Quotes from John Fowles

The thing I felt most clearly, when the first corner was turned, was that I had escaped. Obscurer, but no less strong, was the feeling that she loved me more than I loved her, and that consequently I had in some indefinable way won.

But he was absolutely alone. No one ever wrote to him. Visited him. Totally alone. And I believe the happiest man I have ever met.

A word (...) is never the destination, merely a signpost in its general direction; and whatever (...) body that destination finally acquires owes quite as much to the reader as to the writer.

Not that I will paint in my own way, live in my own way, speak in my own way—they don't mind that. It even excites them. But what they can't stand is that I hate them when they don't behave in their own way.

Images are inherently fascistic because they overstamp the truth, however dim and blurred, of the real past experience; as if, faced with ruins, we must turn architects, not archeologists.

You use your life.

Love is something that comes in different clothes, with a different way and different face, and perhaps it takes a long time for you to accept it, to be able to call it love.

You despise the real bourgeois classes for all their snobbishness and their snobbish voices and ways. You do, don't you? Yet all you put in their place is a horrid little refusal to have nasty thoughts or do nasty things or be nasty in any way. Do you know that every great thing in the story of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?

There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be.

A look I shall never forget, because it was almost one of hatred, and hatred in her face was like spite in the Virgen Mary's; it reversed the entire order of nature.

In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love.

I know I can't do things like love by halves, I know I have love pent up in me, I shall throw myself away, lose my heart and my body and my mind and soul to some cad like G.P. Who'll betray me. I feel it.

Ogni epoca, ogni epoca colpevole, erige alte mura intorno alle sue Versailles; e io personalmente le odio ancora di più quando vengono costruite dalla letteratura e dall'arte.

If Rome, a city of the vulgar living, had been depressing after Greece, London, a city of the drab dead, was fifty times worse.

Death starves us of life. So we learn to fabricate our own immortalities.

A mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless... speciesless.

I could offer no consolation and I do not think he wanted any. There are situations in which consolation only threatens the equilibrium that time has instituted.

He said it as if 'very rich' was a nationality; as perhaps it is.

The truth was she couldn't do ugly things. She was too beautiful.

It was curious how quiet that last evening was; as if I had already left, and we were just two ghosts talking to each other.

Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society. It

My only certainty in life is that I shall one day die. I can be certain of nothing else in the future. But either we survive (and so far in human history a vast majority has always survived) and having survived when we might not have done so gives us what we call happiness; or we do not survive and do not know it.

Nice girl, dear boy. Oh . . . I shrugged. You know. Most attractive. Cheaper than central heating. I'm sure.

Because they died, we know we still live. Because a star explodes and a thousand worlds like ours die, we know this world is. That is the smile: that what might not be, is.