John Fowles Quotes

Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the only thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see relationships between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women - and absurd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships.

There are three types of intelligent persons: the first so intelligent that being called very intelligent must seem natural and obvious; the second sufficiently intelligent to see that he is being flattered, not described; the third so little intelligent that he will believe anything. I knew I belonged to the second kind.

But forgetting's not something you do, it happens to you.

It's like the day you realize dolls are dolls. I pick up my old self and I see it's silly. A toy I've played with too often. It's a little sad, like an old golliwog at the bottom of the cupboard. Innocent and used-up and proud and silly.

Her stare fixed me. Without rancour and without regret; without triumph and without evil; as Desdemona once looked back on Venice.

On the incomprehension, the baffled rage of Venice. I had taken myself to be in some way the traitor Iago punished, in an unwritten sixth act. Chained in hell. But I was also Venice; the state left behind; the thing journeyed from.

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

"I say "her," but the pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented; what came to Charles was not a pronoun, but eyes, looks, the line of the hair over a temple, a nimble step, a sleeping face."

The two of us in that room. No past, no future. All intense deep that-time-only. A feeling that everything must end, the music, ourselves, the moon, everything. That if you get to the heart of things you find sadness for ever and ever, everywhere; but a beautiful silver sadness, like a Christ face.

You know what you do? You know how rain takes the colour out of everything? That's what you do to the English language. You blur it every time you open your mouth.

We talked for hours. He talked and I listened.
It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.

The only thing that really matters is feeling and living what you believe - so long as it's something more than belief in your own comfort.

You will see that Charles set his sights high. Intelligent idlers always have, in order to justify their idleness to their intelligence.

The second cause of failure to enact good stems from conflict of intention. High intelligence leads to multiplicity of interest and a sharpened capacity to foresee the consequences of any action. Will is lost in a labyrinth of hypothesis.

All of us are failures; we all die.

Nobody wants to be a nobody. All our acts are partly devised to fill or to mask the emptiness we feel at the core.

We all like to be loved or hated; it is a sign that we shall be remembered, that we did not 'not exist'. For this reason, many unable to create love have created hate. That too is remembered.

I was worse off than even Alison was; she hated life, I hated mysef. I had created nothing, I belonged to nothingness, to the néant, and it seemed to me that my own death was the only thing left that I could create.