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John Fowles

73 quotes

“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...”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To my horror I began to cry...a great cloud of black guilt, knowledge of my atrocious selfishness, settled on me. One day she had said “when you love me (and she had not meant ‘make love to me’) it’s as if God forgave me for being the mess I am”; and I took it as chicanery, another emotional blackmail, to make me feel essential and give me a sense of responsibility towards her...My monstrous crime was Adam’s, the oldest and most vicious of all – male selfishness...Something far worse than lèse majesté. Lèse-humanité.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You sound like a certain kind of surgeon. A lot more interested in the operation than the patient." "I should not be in the hands of a surgeon who did not take that view.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All good science is art. And all good art is science.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I played him the Goldberg Variations. If one wishes to reduce a sensitive German to tears there is no surer lachrymatory.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I did not like the colonel at all. He had eyes like razors…the eyes of a machine. An educated machine… I realised he was drinking less than we were…And that he was playing with me. That he was a realist… Also that Anton was careless with his tongue...”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There was a bright wind, it was a Dufy day, all bustle, movement, animated colour..”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Once again fear, and mystery, swept over me...I was infinitely far from home. The profoundest distances are never geographical...”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hypotheses pinned me down, as Gulliver was pinned by the countless threads of the Lilliputians...”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So I strode down to the school like some vengence-brewing chieftain in an Icelandic saga...”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Though not large it had a certain elegance; a pilastered portico, windows with graceful pediments. The whitewashed façade was in shadow, a palid blue against the evening sky’s pale blue.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I felt both a state of envy and contempt. The yacht itself was not vulgar, but I smelt something vulgar about owning it...A few moments later I set off back to my dull daily penal colony of an existence on the far side of the dream, as Adam left the Garden of Eden perhaps…except I knew there were no Gods, and nothing was going to bar my return...”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Pois eisai? She wanted to know. Pou pas? The old Homeric questions of the Greek peasant. Who art thou? Where goest thou?”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Utram bibis? Aquam an undam?”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Well, then there was the bit in the local paper about the scholarship she’d won and how clever she was, and her name as beautiful as herself, Miranda. So I knew she was up in London studying art. It really made a difference, that newspaper article. It seemed like we became more intimate, although of course we still did not know each other in the ordinary way. I can’t say what it was, the very first time I saw her, I knew she was the only one. Of course I am not mad, I knew it was just a dream and it always would have been if it hadn’t been for the money. I used to have daydreams about her, I used to think of stories where I met her, did things she admired, married her and all that. Nothing nasty, that was never until what I’ll explain later.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The artefacts of a genius are distinguished by rich human content, for which he forges new images and new techniques, creates new styles. He sees himself as a unique eruption in the desert of the banal. He feels himself mysteriously inspired or possessed. The craftsman, on the other hand, is content to use the traditional materials and techniques. The more self-possessed he is, the better craftsman he will be. What pleases him is skill of execution. He is very concerned with his contemporary success, his market value. If a certain kind of political commitment is fashionable, he may be committed; but out of fashion, not conviction. The genius, of course, is largely indifferent to contemporary success; and his commitment to his ideals, both artistic and political, is profoundly, Byronically, indifferent to their contemporary popularity.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If there was some central theme beneath the (more Irish than Greek) stew of intuitions about the nature of human existence – and of fiction – it is perhaps in the alternative title, whose rejection I still sometimes regret: The Godgame. I did intend Conchis to exhibit a series of masks representing human notions of God, from the supernatural to the jargon-ridden scientific, that is, a series of human illusions about something that does not exist in fact, absolute knowledge and absolute power. The destruction of such illusions seems to me still an eminently humanist aim; and I wish there were some super-Conchis who could put the Arabs and the Israelis, or the Ulster Catholics and Protestants, through the same heuristic mill as Nicholas.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Introduction (1977 edition)
“By this sinister elision, this slipping from true remorse, the belief that the suffering we have precipitated ought to ennoble us, or at least make us less ignoble from then on, to disguised self-forgiveness, the belief that suffering in some way ennobles life, so that the precipitation of pain comes, by such a cockneyed algebra, to equal the ennoblement, or at any rate the enrichment, of life, 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 that accusing death; and hardened myself, to say nothing of it at Bourani. I was still determined to tell Julie, but at the right time and place, when the exchange rate between confession and the sympathy it evoked looked very likely to be high.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She turned to look at him — or as it seemed to Charles, through him. It was not so much what was positively in that face which remained with him after that first meeting, but all that was not as he had expected; for theirs was an age when the favoured feminine look was the demure, the obedient, the shy. Charles felt immediately as if he had trespassed; as if the Cobb belonged to that face, and not to the Ancient Borough of Lyme. It was not a pretty face like Ernestina's. It was certainly not a beautiful face, by any period's standard or taste. But it was an unforgettable face, and a tragic face. Its sorrow welled out of it as purely, naturally and unstoppably as water out of a woodland spring. There was no artifice there, no hypocrisy, no hysteria, no mask; and above all, no sign of madness. The madness was in the empty sea, the empty horizon, the lack of reason for such sorrow; as if the spring was natural in itself, but unnatural in welling from a desert.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A tiny wren perched on top of a bramble not ten feet from him and trilled its violent song. He saw its glittering black eyes, the red and yellow of its song-gaped throat — a midget ball of feathers that yet managed to make itself the Announcing Angel of evolution: I am that I am, thou shalt not pass my being now. He stood as Pisanello's saint stood, astonished perhaps more at his own astonishment at this world's existing so close, so within reach of all that suffocating banality of ordinary day. In those few moments of defiant song, any ordinary hour or place — and therefore the vast infinity of all Charles's previous hours and places — seemed vulgarized, coarsened, made garish. The appallimg ennui of human reality lay cleft to the core; and the heart of all life pulsed there in the wren's triumphant throat.”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The dinner that evening was dreadful, the epitome of English vacuity...they were all the same, each mind set in the same weird armour, like an archosaur’s ruff, like a fringe of icicles. All I heard the whole evening was the tinkle of broken ice-needles as people tried timidly and vainly to reach through the stale fence of words, tinkle, tinkle, and then withdraw. Nobody behaved with breadth, with warmth, with naturalness, and finally it became pathetic. We were all the same; I hardly said anything, but that made me no more innocent – or less conditioned. The solemn figures of the Old Country, the Queen, the Public School, Oxbridge, the Right Accent, People Like Us, stood around the table like secret police, ready to crush down in an instant on any attempt at an intelligent European humanity.* We…were held by those cloud-grey shapes on the world’s blue rim. Death machines holding thousands of gum-chewing, contraceptive-carrying men; for some reason more 30 years away than 30 miles; as if we were looking into the future, not the south; into a world where there were no more Prosperos, no private domains, no Poetries, fantasies, tender sexual promises...I felt acutely the fragility of time itself...”
John Fowles (1926–2005) said by 2005 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source