John Fowles Quotes

Between skin and skin there is only light. And there was my poetry.

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.

It was not the mask I was afraid of...but of what lay behind the mask. The eternal source of all fear, all horror, all real evil, man himself

He knew the world and its absurdities as only an intelligent Irishman can; which is to say that where his knowledge or memory failed him, his imagination was always ready to fill the gap.

I mean I never feel I feel what I ought to feel.

"I don't believe in God. And I certainly don't feel chosen."

"I think you may be."

I smiled dubiously. "Thank you."

"It is not meant as a compliment. Hazard makes you elect. You cannot elect yourself."

I'm not really sorry. But I'm not absolutely unsorry.

I saw that I was from now on, for ever, contemptible. I had been and remained, intensely depressed, but I had also been, and always would be, intensely false; in existentialist terms, inauthentic. I knew I would never kill myself, I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.

"Ask me to marry you."

"Will you marry me?"

"No."

I was not a poet. I felt no consolation in this knowledge, but only a red anger that evolution could allow such sensitivity and such inadequacy to coexist in the same mind. In one ego, my ego, screaming like a hare caught in a gin.

- Вот она, истина. Не в серпе и молоте. Не в звездах и полосах. Не в распятии. Не в солнце. Не в золоте. Не в инь и ян. В улыбке.

Sometimes to return is a vulgarity.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

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.

I know what it's like when people go away. It's agony for a week, then painful for a week, then you begin to forget, and then it seems as it never happened, it happened to someone else, and you start shrugging. You say, dingo, it's life, that's the way the things are. Stupid things like that. As if you haven't really lost something for ever.