Quotes from John Fowles

Man is an everlack, an infinite withoutness, afloat on an apparently endless ocean of apparently endless indifference to individual things. Obscurely he sees catastrophes happening to other rafts, rafts that are too distant for him to determine whether they have other humans aboard, but too numerous and too identical for him to presume that they have not.

Talking about acting is like boasting about pictures you're going to paint. The most terrible bad form.

she was really very pretty, one of the prettiest girls she knew. And as if to prove it she raised her arms and unloosed her hair, a thing she knew to be vaguely sinful, yet necessary, like a hot bath or a warm bed on a winter's night. She imagined herself for a truly sinful moment as someone wicked — a dancer, an actress.

I hate beyond hate.

A total stranger, and one not of one's sex, is often the least prejudiced judge.

Now I understand why you grow so many flowers. She shifted her head, not understanding. I said, To cover the stink of sulphur.

Even the simplest knowledge of the names and habits of flowers or trees starts this distinguishing or individuating process, and removes us a step from total reality towards anthropocentrism.

The honest poor are the moneyless vulgar rich. Poverty forces them to have good qualities and pride in other things besides money. Then when they have money they don't know what to do with it. They forget all the old virtues, which weren't real virtues anyway. They think the only virtue is to make more money and to spend. They can't imagine that there are people to whom money is nothing. That the most beautiful things are quite independent of money.

No religion is the only religion, no church the true church.

The feeling that he would probably betray me. And I've always thought of marriage as a sort of young adventure, two people of the same age setting out together, discovering together, growing together. But I would have nothing to tell him, nothing to show him. All the helping would be on his side.

Love is the mistery between two people, not the identity. We were at the opposite poles of humanity. Lily was humanity bound to duty, unable to choose, suffering, at the mercy of social ideals. Humanity both crucified and marching towards the cross. And I was free, I was Peter three times to renounce -- determined to survive, whatever the cost.

We think we grow old, we grow wise and more tolerant; we just grow more lazy.

Sunt plin? de singur?tate byronian?, dar n?am nici una dintre supapele de desc?rcare ale poetului: geniul ?i adulterul.

Lizards flashed up the pine-trunks like living emerald necklaces.

Half by desipience, half by proclivity, he had come to live in a world where the only significant leisure activities were coupling and consuming. His batrachian lips pursed into a smile, and he dug again into the honey.

If you feel something deeply, you're not ashamed to show your feeling.

He said, men are vile. I said, the vilest thing about them is that they can say that with a smile on their faces.

Long afterwards I realized why some men, racing drivers and their like, become addicted to speed. There are those of us who never see death ahead, but eternally behind: in any moment that stops and thinks.

Ne considera, pe mine si pe fete, imaturi si naivi, dar noi ne puteam dovedi de zece ori mai perfizi decat el, tocmai pentru ca eram englezi - nascuti pentru a purta masca si educati de mici sa mintim.

Then she did something as strange, as shocking, as if she had thrown off her clothes. She smiled.

what you do blurs over what you did before.

But suddenly he comprehended why her face haunted him, why he felt this terrible need to see her again: it was to possess her, to melt into her, to burn, to burn, to burn to ashes on that body and in those eyes. To postpone such a desire for a week, a month, a year, several years even, that can be done. But for eternity is when the iron bites.

if Greece were a woman so sensually provocative that I must fall physically and desperately in love with her, and at the same time so calmly aristocratic that I should never be able to approach her.

and his eyes had that splendid innocence, that opaque blue candour of the satanically fallen. ~ The French Lieutenant's Woman