John Fowles Quotes

143 quotes in 1871 categories

• There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what…
• To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
• Content is a word unknown to life; it is also a word unknown to man.
• 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 great majority of modern third-person narration is "I" narration very thinly disguised.
• On the whole, dialogue is the most difficult thing, without any doubt. It's very difficult, unfortunately. You have to detach yourself from the notion of…
• Because a star explodes and a thousand worlds like ours die, we know this world is. That is the smile: that what might not be,…
• Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.
• Always we try to put the wild in a cage.
• Like all mystics (and many novelists, not least the present one) he is baffled, a child, before the real now; far happier out of it,…
• He felt himself in suspension between the two worlds, the warm, neat civilization behind his back, the cool, dark mystery outside. We all write poems;…
• And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did.
• Though I like the various forms of football in the world, I don't think they begin to compare with these two great Anglo-Saxon ball games…
• He's not human; he's an empty space disguised as a human.
• Whatever sympathy I feel towards religions, whatever admiration for some of their adherents, whatever historical or biological necessity I see in them, whatever metaphorical truth,…
• The absurdly neurotic role you and the rest of your kind have always attributed to me Erato, the Goddess Muse of Erotic Poetry bears no…
• Time is not a road - it is a room.
• People knew less of each other, and so were more individual. The entire world was not for them only a push or switch away. Strangers…
• An easterly is the most disagreeable wind in Lyme Bay — Lyme Bay being that largest bite from the underside of England's outstretched southwestern legÂ…
• 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…

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