Quotes from John Fowles

He had the charm of all people who believe implicitly in themselves, that of integration.

It was an unforgettable painting; it set a dense golden halo of light round the most trivial of moments, so that the moment, and all such moments, could never be completely trivial again.

I don't believe in God. And I certainly don't feel chosen. I think you may be. I smiled dubiously. Thank you. It is not meant as a compliment. Hazard makes you elect. You cannot elect yourself.

He is the same, but everything is different.

It was too exactly as imagined to be true. But I felt as gladly and expectantly disorientated, as happily and alertly alone, as Alice in Wonderland.

if you knew the mess my life was in … the waste of it … the uselessness of it. I have no moral purpose, no real sense of duty to anything. It seems only a few months ago that I was twenty-one – full of hopes … all disappointed.

You may wonder how I had not seen it before. I believe I had. But to see something is not the same as to acknowledge it.

I had got away from what I hated, but I hadn't found where I loved, and so I pretended that there was nowhere to love.

I want to tell you what's really happened. Not now. Please not now. Whatever's happened, come and make love to me. And we did make love; not sex, but love; though sex would have been so much wiser.

Sometimes to return is a vulgarity.

When I was going on one day in the car about not having any close friends - using my favourite metaphor: the cage of glass between me and the rest of the world - she just laughed. 'You like it,' she said. 'You say you're isolated, boyo, but you really think you're different.

Poetry had always seemed something I could turn to in need - an emergency exit, a lifebuoy, as well as a justification.

Girls possess sexual tact in inverse proportion to their standard of education.

I did not pray for her, because prayer has no efficacy; I did not cry for her, or for myself, because only extroverts cry twice; but I sat in the silence of that night, that infinite hostility to man, to permanence, to love, remembering her, remembering her.

Maurice once said to me- when I had asked him a question rather like yours - he said, An answer is always a form of death There was something else in her face then. It was not implaceable; but in some way impermeable. 'I think questions are a form of life

I had always believed, and not only out of cynicism, that a man and a woman could tell in the first ten minutes whether they wanted to go to bed together; and that the time that passed after those first ten minutes represented a tax, which might be worth paying if the article promised to be really enjoyable, but which nine times out of ten became rapidly excessive.

Each pleasure we feel is a pleasure less; each day a stroke on a calendar. What we will not accept is that the joy in the day and the passing of the day are inseparable. What makes our existence worthwhile is precisely that its worth and its while - its quality and duration - are as impossible to unravel as time and space in mathematics of relativity.

Our stereotyping societies force us to feel more alone. They stamp masks on us and isolate out real selves. We all live in two worlds: the old comfortable man-centred world of absolutes and the harsh real world of relatives. The latter, the relativity reality, terrifies us; and isolates and dwarfs us all.

The second cause of failure to enact good stems from conflict of intention. High intelligence leads to multiplicity of interest and a sharpened capacity to foresee the consequences of any action. Will is lost in a labyrinth of hypothesis.

I think he was a little like the lizard that changes color with its surroundings. He appeared far more a gentleman in a gentleman's house. In that inn, I saw him for what he was. And I knew his color there was far more natural than the other.

In a vivid insight, a flash of black lightning, he saw that all life was parallel: that evolution was not vertical, ascending to a perfection, but horizontal. Time was a great fallacy; existence was without history, was always now, was always this being caught in the same fiendish machine. All those painted screens erected by man to shut out reality - history, religion, duty, social position, all were illusions, mere opium fantasies. - The French Lieutenant's Woman

I hate people who collect things and classify things and give them names and then forget all about them. That's what people are always doing in art. They call a painter an impressionist or a cubist or something and then they put him in a drawer and don't see him as a living individual painter any more.

Nu poti sa urasti pe cineva deja infrant.Care, fara tine, nu va mai fi niciodata om intreg.

She was a mirror that did not lie; whose interest in me was real; whose love was real.