Quotes from John Fowles

Urasc oamenii de stiinta care colectioneaza lucruri si le clasifica si le dau nume,ca apoi sa uite cu totul de ele.La fel se intampla si in arta.Eticheteaza un pictor drept impresionist sau cubist sau altceva si il pun intr-un anume sertar si nu se mai gandesc la ca la o fiinta umana care picteaza

This pain, this terrible seeing-through that is in me now. It wasn't necessary. It is all pain, and it buys nothing. Gives birth to nothing. All in vain. All wasted. The older the world becomes, the more obvious it is. The bomb and the tortures in Algeria and the starving babies in the Congo. It gets bigger and darker. More and more suffering for more and more. And more and more in vain.

I knew that on that island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so few meetings that one too easily saw out of the present, and then the past seemed ten times closer than it was.

Knowledge of my atrocious selfishness, settled on me. All those bitter home truths she had flung at me, right from the beginning…and still loved me; was so blind that she still loved me. One day she had said: When you love me (and she had not meant "make love to me") it's as if God forgave me for being the mess I am; and I took it as chicanery, another emotional blackmail, to make me feel essential and so give me a sense of responsibility towards her.

Just those three words, said and meant.I love you.

When you love me, it's as if God forgave me for being the mess I am.

It was not the mask I was afraid of...but of what lay behind the mask. The eternal source of all fear, all horror, all real evil, man himself

As if I'd lit a fire in the darkness to try and warm us. And all I'd done was to see his real face by it.

If you are wise, you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.

She was trying to write a novel, it was so slow, you had to destroy so much and start again; so hard to discover whether one was really a writer or just a victim of a literary home environment.

It's despair at the lack of (I'm cheating, I didn't say all these things - but I'm going to write what I want to say as well as what I did) feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world.

He said, one has to learn that painting well - in the academic and technical sense - comes right at the bottom of the list. I mean, you've got that ability. So have thousands.

Sarah turned on her, and shook her head. You may keep them. And if it is possible with so small a sum of money, I suggest you purchase some instrument of torture. I am sure Mrs. Fairly will be pleased to help you use it upon all those wretched enough to come under your power.

Everything free and decent in life is being locked away in filthy little cellars by beastly people who don't care.

The battle was over. Our causalities were some thirteen thousand killed. Thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes- because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself- and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud.

S?radan insan uygarl???n lanetidir.

He makes me change, he makes me want to dance round him, bewilder him, dazzle him, dumbfound him. He' so slow, so unimaginative, so lifeless. Like zinc white. I see it's a sort of tyranny he has over me. He forces me to be changeable, to act. To show off. The hateful tyranny of weak people. G.P. said it once. The ordinary man is the curse of civilization.

An answer is always a form of death.

You have shared your secret. I think you will find it to be an unburdening in many other ways. You have very considerable natural advantages. You have nothing to fear from life. A day will come when these recent unhappy years may seem no more than that cloud-stain over there upon Chesil Bank. You shall stand in sunlight—and smile at your own past sorrows.

Your first reaction is the characteristic one of your contrasuggestible century: to disbelieve, to disprove. I see this very clearly underneath your politeness.

It makes me sick,the blindness, deadness, out-of-dateness, stodginess and, yes, sheer jealous malice of the great bulk of England.

Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.

She had only a candle's light to see by, but candlelight never did badly by any woman.

All would be well when she was truly his; in his bed and in his bank ... and of course in his heart, too.