John Fowles Quotes

"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 - they were successful because they imposed chaos on order. They tore up the commandments, they denied the super-ego, what you will. They said, "You may persecute the minority, you may kill, you may torture, you may couple and breed without love." They offered humanity all its great temptations. Nothing is true, everything is permitted."

I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren't ashamed of being dull and little.

She was a mirror that did not lie; whose interest in me was real; whose love was real.

She had something that is gone from the world, from the female world. A sweetness without sentimentality, a limpidity without naivety. She was so easy to hurt, to tease. And when she teased, it was like a caress.

We can sometimes recognize the looks of a century ago on a modern face; but never those of a century to come.

Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.

We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.

I am one in a row of specimens. It's when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I'm meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive. but it's the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead.

We are all in flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo Sapiens.

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

What you love is your own love. It's not love, it's selfishness. It's not me you think of, but what you feel about me.

People who teach you cram old ideas, old views, old ways, into you. Like covering plants with layer after layer of old earth; it's no wonder the poor things so rarely come up fresh and green.

The best wines take the longest to mature.

Each pleasure we feel is a pleasure less; each day a stroke on a calendar. What we will not accept is that the joy in the day and the passing of the day are inseparable. What makes our existence worthwhile is precisely that its worth and its while - its quality and duration - are as impossible to unravel as time and space in mathematics of relativity.

If there is a God he's a great loathsome spider in the darkness.