Quotes from John Fowles

It's like football. Two sides may each want to beat the other, they may even hate each other as sides, but if someone came and told them football is stupid and not worth playing or caring about, then they'd feel together. It's feeling that matters.

Un raspuns este intotdeauna o forma a mortii - Eu cred ca intrebarile sunt o forma a vietii.

I could scream abuse at him all day long; he wouldn't mind at all. It's me he wants, my look, my outside; not my emotions or my mind or my soul or even my body. Not anything human.

One writes things and the implications shriek- it's like suddenly realizing one's deaf.

I'm so far from everything. From normality. From light. From everything I want to be.

Humour is a manifestation of freedom. It is because there is freedom that there is smile.

Perhaps nowhere is our human mania for possessing, our delusion that the owned cannot have a soul of its own, more harmful to us. This disanimation justified all the horrors of the African slave trade. If the black man is so stupid that he can be enslaved, he cannot have the soul of a white man, he must be a mere animal.

I'm Emma with her silly little clever-clever theories of love and marriage, and 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.

Why should people have money if they don't know how to use it?

Think what it would be like if you got back to your island and there was no old man, no girl any more. No mysterious fun and games. The whole place locked up forever.

Write, if you must, because you feel like writing, never because you feel you ought to write.

We shall never fully understand nature (or ourselves), and certainly never respect it, until we dissociate the wild from the notion of usability - however innocent and harmless the use. For it is the general uselessness of so much of nature that lies at the root of our ancient hostility and indifference to it.

I felt like a germ that had landed, like the first penicillin microbe, not only in a culture where it was totally at home, totally nourished; but in a situation in which it was infinitely significant.

The thin end of the sensible clothes wedge had been inserted in society by the disgraceful Mrs Bloomer a decade and a half before the year of which I write; but that early attempt at the trouser suit had been comprehensively defeated by the crinoline--a small fact of considerable significance in our understanding of the Victorians. They were offered sense; and chose a six-foot folly unparalleled in the most folly-ridden of minor arts.

But though one may keep the wolves from one's door, they still howl out there in the darkness.

If I could put a starving child before him and give it food and let him watch it grow well, I know he'd give money. But everything beyond what he pays for and sees himself get is suspicious to him. He doesn't believe in any other world but the one he lives in and sees. He's the one in prison; in his own hateful narrow present world.

Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation.

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

It's like living in the Arabian Nights. Being the favourite in the harem. But the one perfume you really want is freedom.

He uses my heart. Then turns and tramples on it.

a beautiful silver sadness, like a Christ face.

It is not the state of war that isolates. It is well known, it brings people together. But in the battlefield -- that is something different. Because that is when the real enemy, death, appears. I no longer saw any warmth in numbers. I saw only Thanatos in them, my death. And just as much in my own comrades, in Montague, as in the invisible Germans.

If I could only escape, if I could only escape... he murmured the words to himself a dozen times; then metaphorically shook himself for being so impractical, so romantic, so dutiless.

Henry knew sin was a challenge to life; not an act of unreason, but an act of courage and determination.