John Fowles quotes - page 3

Between skin and skin, there is only light. (John Fowles)
To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape. View quote
John Fowles
I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that's the lot. There's no mercy in things. There's not even a Great Beyond. There's nothing. View quote
John Fowles
If you forget everything else about me, please remember this. I walked down that street and I never looked back and I love you. I love you. I love you so much that I shall hate you for ever for today. View quote
John Fowles
There are some men who are consoled by the idea that there are women less attractive than their wives; and others who are haunted by the knowledge that there are more attractive. View quote
John Fowles
We are all in flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo Sapiens. View quote
John Fowles
There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves. View quote
John Fowles
The moon hung over the planet Earth, a dead thing over a dying thing. View quote
John Fowles
I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness, to death. View quote
John Fowles
They looked down on her; and she looked up through them. View quote
John Fowles
I must fight with my weapons. Not his. Not selfishness and brutality and shame and resentment. (John Fowles)
I mean I never feel I feel what I ought to feel. View quote
John Fowles
The world began in hazard and will end in it. View quote
John Fowles
The best wines take the longest to mature. View quote
John Fowles
His statement to himself should have been 'I possess this now, therefore I am happy', instead of what it so Victorianly was: 'I cannot possess this forever, therefore I am sad. View quote
John Fowles
I hated myself. I had created nothing, I belonged to nothingness, to the néant, and it seemed to me that my own death was the only thing that I could create; and still, even then, I thought it might accuse everyone who had ever known me. It would validate all my cynicism, it would prove all my solitary selfishness; it would stand, and be remembered, as a final dark victory. View quote
John Fowles
It. Is. Not. Ended. There was just the trace of a humourless smile on his face; and more than a trace of menace. As if he meant something more than that there was a sequel to this scene; but that the whole Nazi weltanschaaung to be, resurrected and realised. He was an impressively iron man... View quote
John Fowles
We were equally tired, in mid-century, of cold sanity and hot blasphemy; of the over-cerebral and of the over-faecal; the way out lay somewhere else. Words had lost their power, either for good or for evil; still hung, like a mist, over the reality of action, distorting, misleading, castrating; but at least since Hitler and Hiroshima they were seen to be a mist, a flimsy superstructure. View quote
John Fowles
All the time I felt I was being watched, that I was not alone, that I was putting on an act for the benefit of someone, that this action could be done only if it was spontaneous, pure – and moral. Because more and more it crept through my mind with the chill spring night that I was trying to commit not a moral action, but a fundamentally aesthetic one; to do something that would end my life sensationally, significantly, consistently. It was a Mercutio death I was looking for, not a real one. A death to be remembered, not the true death of a true suicide, the death obliterate. View quote
John Fowles
The mess of my life, the selfishnesses and false turnings and the treacheries, all these things could fall into place, they could become a source of construction rather than a source of chaos, and precisely because I had no other choice. View quote
John Fowles
When she was home from her boarding-school I used to see her almost every day sometimes, because their house was right opposite the Town Hall Annexe. She and her younger sister used to go in and out a lot, often with young men, which of course I didn't like. When I had a free moment from the files and ledgers I stood by the window and used to look down over the road over the frosting and sometimes I'd see her. In the evening I marked it in my observations diary, at first with X, and then when I knew her name with M. (John Fowles)
I still couldn't accept that this was not some nightmare, like some freak misbinding in a book, a Lawrence novel become, at the turn of a page, one by Kafka. View quote
John Fowles
By this characteristically twentieth century retreat from content into form, from meaning into appearance, from ethics into aesthetics, from aqua into unda, I dulled the pain of accusing death, and hardened myself. View quote
John Fowles
Years later I saw the gabbia at Piacenza; a harsh black canary-cage strung up high the side of the the towering campanile, in which prisoners were once left to starve to death and rot in full view of the town below. And looking up at it, I remembered that winter in Greece, that Gabbia I had constructed for myself out of light, solitude and self-delusions. My feelings at the end of that wretched term, were those of a man who knows he is in a cage, exposed to the jeers of all his old ambitions until he dies. View quote
John Fowles
He's so slow, so unimaginative, so lifeless. Like zinc white. I see it's a sort of tyranny he has over me. He forces me to be changeable, to act. To show off. The hateful tyranny of weak people. View quote
John Fowles