John Fowles Quotes - Page 4

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• The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed--thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes--because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself--and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud.

  John Fowles

  Love, Memories, War

  John Fowles (1965). “The Magus”

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• Ask me to marry you." "Will you marry me?" "No.

  John Fowles

  Will You Marry Me, Marry Me, Ask Me

  John Fowles (1968). “The Magus”, Pan

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• It's despair at the lack of feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world. It's despair that perfectly normal young men can be made vicious and evil because they've won a lot of money. And then do what you've done to me.

  John Fowles

  Life, Men, Perfectly Normal

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• These last few days I've felt Godless. I've felt cleaner, less muddled, less blind. I still believe in a God. But he's so remote, so cold, so mathematical. I see that we have to live as if there is no God. Prayer and worship and singing hymns-all silly and useless.

  John Fowles

  God, Religious, Prayer

  John Fowles (2010). “The Collector”, p.223, Random House

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• That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women seetherelationship between objects? It is an extra dimension of feeling which we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women?and absurd.

  John Fowles

  Sex, Real, War

  1965 The Magus, ch.52.

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• They looked down on her; and she looked up through them.

  John Fowles

  JOHN FOWLES (1969). “THE FRENCH LIEUTENTANT'S WOMAN”

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• The privileges of knowledge have to be bought at the cost of the consolations of ignorance.

  John Fowles

  Ignorance, Cost, Privilege

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• But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating.

  John Fowles

  Personality, Lines, Paint

  John Fowles (1980). “The collector”, Dell Pub Co

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• Our present educational systems are all paramilitary. Their aim is to produce servants or soldiers who obey without question and who accepts their training as the best possible training. Those who are most successful in the state are those who have the most interest in prolonging the state as it is; they are also those who have the most say in the educational system, and in particular by ensuring that the educational product they want is the most highly rewarded.

  John Fowles

  Educational, Successful, Soldier

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• I am going to explain to you why we went to war. Why mankind always goes to war. It is not social or political. It is not countries that go to war, but men. It is like salt. Once one has been to war, one has salt for the rest of one's life. Do you understand?

  John Fowles

  Life, Country, Laughter

  "The Magus".

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• The word is the most imprecise of signs. Only a science-obsessed age could fail to comprehend that this is its great virtue, not its defect.

  John Fowles

  Age, Failing, Virtue

  John Fowles (1977). “Daniel Martin”, Jonathan Cape

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• Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation.

  John Fowles

  Sight, Desolation, Whole

  John Fowles (1977). “Daniel Martin”, Jonathan Cape

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• One of the great fallacies of our time is that the Nazis rose to power because they imposed order on chaos. Precisely the opposite is true

  John Fowles

  Order, Opposites, Rose

  John Fowles (1968). “The Magus”, Pan

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• No amount of reading and intelligent deduction could supplant the direct experience.

  John Fowles

  Reading, Intelligent, Experience

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• Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls around its Versailles; and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art.

  John Fowles

  Art, Wall, Hate

  JOHN FOWLES (1969). “THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN”

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• Evolution did not intend trees to grow singly. Far more than ourselves they are social creatures, and no more natural as isolated specimens than man is as a marooned sailor or hermit.

  John Fowles

  Men, Tree, Sailor

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• The ordinary man is the curse of civilization.

  John Fowles

  Men, Civilization, Ordinary

  John Fowles (1963). “The collector”

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• That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.

  John Fowles

  Romance, Mystery, Trouble

  JOHN FOWLES (1969). “THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN”

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• I knew words were like chains, they held me back . . . the act of description taints the description.

  John Fowles

  Description, Chains

  John Fowles (1965). “The Magus”

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• The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.

  John Fowles

  Men, Mask, Pronouns

  JOHN FOWLES (1969). “THE FRENCH LIEUTENTANT'S WOMAN”

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• Edith Sitwell's interest in art was largely confined to portraits of herself.

  John Fowles

  Art, Portraits, Interest

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• The newspapers are full of what we would like to happen to us and what we hope will never happen to us.

  John Fowles

  Hope, Newspapers, Happens

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• The American myth is of free will in its simple, primary sense. One can choose oneself and will oneself; and this absurdly optimistic assumption so dominates the republic that it has bred all its gross social injustices.

  John Fowles

  Optimistic, Simple, Republic

  John Fowles (1977). “Daniel Martin”, Jonathan Cape

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• The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time.

  John Fowles

  Misery, Century, Lack Of Time

  JOHN FOWLES (1969). “THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN”

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• You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts.

  John Fowles

  Voice, Choices, Speak

  John Fowles (1963). “The collector”

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