Quotes from John Fowles, The Magus

To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.

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.

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.

So that the smile was not so much an attitude to be taken to life as the nature of the cruelty of life, a cruelty we cannot even choose to avoid, since it is human existence.

If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence.

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.

The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.

The dead live." "How do they live?" "By love.

Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?''For fun?''Fun!' He pounced on the word. 'Words are for truth. For facts. Not fiction.

That is how war corrupts us. It plays on our pride in our own free will.

The height the dupe has fallen is measured by his anger.

Labor is a man crowning glory.""Not this man's.""I quote Marx"I raised my hands. The pickaxe handle had been rough."I quote blisters.

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

Think. In a minute from now you could be saying, I risked death. I threw for life, and I won life. It is a very wonderful feeling. To have survived.

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