John Fowles

Novelist

1926-03-31

Quotes by John Fowles

• I love honesty and freedom and giving. I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.

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• Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish if we are to live in society. It is one I have long ago banished from my life. You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be.

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• The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke.

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• For him the tragedy of Homo sapiens is that the least fit to survive breed the most.

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• In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love.

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• 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.

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• I lay in bed last night and thought of G.P. I thought of being in bed with him. I wanted to be in bed with him. I wanted the marvellous, the fantastic ordinariness of him. His promiscuity is creative. Vital. Even though it hurts. He creates love and life and excitement around him; he lives; the people he loves always remember him.I've always felt like it sometimes. Promiscuous. Anyone I see, even just some boy in the Tube, some man, I think what he would be like in bed. I look at their mouths and their hands, put on a prim expression and think about them having me in bed.Even Toinette, getting into bed with anyone. I used to think it was messy. But love is beautiful, any love. Even just sex.

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• I would have gone to bed with him that night. If he had asked. If he had come and kissed me. Not for his sake, but for being alive's.

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

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• You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it...fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf - your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in the flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo sapiens.

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

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• Thus it had come about that she had read far more fiction, and far more poetry, those two sanctuaries of the lonely, than most of her kind.

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• This pain, this terrible seeing-through that is in me now. It wasn't necessary. It is all pain, and it buys nothing. Gives birth to nothing.All in vain. All wasted.The older the world becomes, the more obvious it is. The bomb and the tortures in Algeria and the starving babies in the Congo. It gets bigger and darker.More and more suffering for more and more. And more and more in vain.

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• Despite all the identifying, measuring, photographing, I had managed to set the experience in a kind of present past, a having looked, even as I was temporally and physically still looking...It is not necessarily too little knowledge that causes ignorance; possessing too much, or wanting to gain too much, can produce the same result.

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• We lack trust in the present, this moment, this actual seeing, because our culture tells us to trust only the reported back, the publicly framed, the edited, the thing set in the clearly artistic or the clearly scientific angle of perspective. One of the deepest lessons we have to learn is that nature, of its nature, resists this. It waits to be seen otherwise, in its individual presentness and from our individual presentness.

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• These question-boundaries ...are ours, not of reality. We are led to them, caged by them not only culturally and intellectually, but quite physically, by the restlessness of our eyes and their limited field and acuity of vision.

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• The moon hung over the planet Earth, a dead thing over a dying thing.

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• The evolution of human mentality has put us all in vitro now, behind the glass wall of our own ingenuity.

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• I knew that on that island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so few meetings that one too easily saw out of the present, and then the past seemed ten times closer than it was.

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• 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.

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