Top 280 John Fowles Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “They pay thousands and thousands for the Van Goghs and Modiglianis they’d have spat on at the time they were painted. Guffawed at. Made coarse jokes about.”

— John Fowles

202. “That is how war corrupts us. It plays on our pride in our own free will.”

— John Fowles

203. “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.”

— John Fowles

204. “And I just can’t live in this present. I would go mad if I did.”

— John Fowles

205. “All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.”

— John Fowles

206. “You accept that you are English. You don’t pretend that you’d rather be French or Italian or something else.”

— John Fowles

207. “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.”

— John Fowles

208. “A look I shall never forget, because it was almost one of hatred, and hatred in her face was like spite in the Virgen Mary’s; it reversed the entire order of nature.”

— John Fowles

209. “The thing I felt most clearly, when the first corner was turned, was that I had escaped. Obscurer, but no less strong, was the feeling that she loved me more than I loved her, and that consequently I had in some indefinable way won.”

— John Fowles

210. “But suddenly he comprehended why her face haunted him, why he felt this terrible need to see her again: it was to possess her, to melt into her, to burn, to burn, to burn to ashes on that body and in those eyes. To postpone such a desire for a week, a month, a year, several years even, that can be done. But for eternity is when the iron bites.”

— John Fowles

211. “Laziness, I am afraid, was Charles’s distinguishing trait.”

— John Fowles

212. “Edith Sitwell’s interest in art was largely confined to portraits of herself.”

— John Fowles

213. “Content is a word unknown to life; it is also a word unknown to man.”

— John Fowles

214. “I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.”

— John Fowles

215. “I would have gone to bed with him that night. If he had asked. If he had come and kissed me. Not for his sake, but for being alive’s.”

— John Fowles

216. “One writes things and the implications shriek- it’s like suddenly realizing one’s deaf.”

— John Fowles

217. “And the sky all wild, all free, all wind and air and space and stars.”

— John Fowles

218. “He uses my heart. Then turns and tramples on it.”

— John Fowles

219. “You come to the United States not knowing what to expect. Then all your worst prejudices are confirmed.”

— John Fowles

220. “German is to death what Latin is to ritual religion – entirely appropriate.”

— John Fowles

221. “It’s despair at the lack of feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It’s despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It’s despair that so few of us care. It’s despair that there’s so much brutality and callousness in the world. It’s despair that perfectly normal young men can be made vicious and evil because they’ve won a lot of money. And then do what you’ve done to me.”

— John Fowles

222. “He had not the benefit of existentialist terminology; but what he felt was a very clear case of the anxiety of freedom – that is, the realization that one is free and the realization that being free is a situation of terror.”

— John Fowles

223. “I happily forgot his little collection of crimped and cramped fruit trees in my own new world, my America of endless natural ones in Devon.”

— John Fowles

224. “You have shared your secret. I think you will find it to be an unburdening in many other ways. You have very considerable natural advantages. You have nothing to fear from life. A day will come when these recent unhappy years may seem no more than that cloud-stain over there upon Chesil Bank. You shall stand in sunlight – and smile at your own past sorrows.”

— John Fowles

225. “He has that selfishness – it’s not even an honest selfishness, because he puts the blame on life and then enjoys being selfish with a free conscience.”

— John Fowles

226. “Just a golden body throwing stones aimlessly into the sea.”

— John Fowles

227. “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.”

— John Fowles

228. “My only happiness is when I sleep. When I wake, the nightmare begins. I feel cast on a desert island, imprisoned, condemned, and I know not what crime it is for.”

— John Fowles

229. “We hardly said anything, we seemed to communicate through the chessmen, there was something very symbolic about my winning. That he wished me to feel. I don’t know what it was. I don’t know whether it was that he wanted me to see my “virtue” triumphed over his “vice” or something subtler, that sometimes losing is winning.”

— John Fowles

230. “Sometimes people say “Good riddance!” in so many words.”

— John Fowles

231. “Oh, you’re like mercury. You won’t be picked up.”

— John Fowles

232. “I had the same feeling I did when I had watched an imago emerge, and then to have to kill it. I mean, the beauty confuses you, you don’t know what you want to do any more, what you should do.”

— John Fowles

233. “The fear I felt was the same old fear; not of the appearance, but of the reason behind the appearance. It was not the mask I was afraid of, because in our century we are too inured by science fiction and too sure of science reality ever to be terrified of the supernatural again; but of what lay behind the mask. The eternal source of all fear, all horror, all real evil, man himself.”

— John Fowles

234. “I think intelligence is terrible. It magnifies all one’s faults. Complicates things that ought to be simple.”

— John Fowles

235. “So that the smile was not so much an attitude to be taken to life as the nature of the cruelty of life, a cruelty we cannot even choose to avoid, since it is human existence.”

— John Fowles

236. “But though one may keep the wolves from one’s door, they still howl out there in the darkness.”

— John Fowles

237. “There were even times I thought I would forget her. But forgetting’s not something you do, it happens to you. Only it didn’t happen to me.”

— John Fowles

238. “We could not expect him to see what we are only just beginning – and with so much more knowledge and the lessons of existentialist philosophy at our disposal – to realise ourselves: that the desire to hold and the desire to enjoy are mutually destructive. His statement to himself should have been, “I possess this now, therefore I am happy,” instead of what it so Victorianly was: “I cannot possess this forever, and therefore am sad.”

— John Fowles

239. “Under the silver nailparing of a moon. I felt, though without any melancholy at all, that sense of existential solitude, the being and being alone in a universe, that still nights sometimes give.”

— John Fowles

240. “Seeing her made me feel like I was catching a rarity, going up to it very careful, heart-in-mouth as they say.”

— John Fowles

241. “He stood before the famous Rembrandt self portrait. The sad, proud old man stared eternally out of his canvas, out of the entire knowledge of his own genius and of the inadequacy of genius before human reality.”

— John Fowles

242. “One of the commonest symptoms of wealth today is destructive neurosis; in his century it was tranquil boredom.”

— John Fowles

243. “I saw that this cataclysm must be an expiation for some barbarous crime of civilization, some terrible human lie. What the lie was, I had too little knowledge of history or science to know then. I know now it was our believing that we were fulfilling some end, serving some plan – that all would come out well in the end, because there was some great plan over all. Instead of the reality. There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves.”

— John Fowles

244. “The lifeless sea was ruffled here and there by a lost zephyr, by a stippling shoal of sardines, dark ash-blue lines that snaked, broad then narrow, in slow motion across the shimmering mirageous surface, as if the water was breeding corruption.”

— John Fowles

245. “There are at least sixteen other Holy Members in Europe. Mostly from mummies, and all equally discredited. But for de Deukans it was simply a collectable, and the religious or indeed human blasphemy it represented had no significance for him. This is true of all collecting. It extinguishes the moral instinct. The object finally possesses the possessor.”

— John Fowles

246. “The horrid old man Sinbad had to carry on his back. That’s what you are. You get on the back of everything vital, everything trying to be honest and free, and you bear it down.”

— John Fowles

247. “I suppose it’s why I hate Australia and I love Australia and I couldn’t ever be happy there and yet I’m always feeling homesick. Does that make sense?”

— John Fowles

248. “Their fear of the open and of the naked. Hide reality, shut out nature. The revolutionary art movement of Charles’s day was of course the Pre-Raphaelite. They, at least, were making an attempt to admit nature and sexuality.”

— John Fowles

249. “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

250. “It poured with rain the day I left. But I was filled with excitement, a strange exuberant sense of taking wing. I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew what I needed. I needed a new land, a new race, a new language; and although I couldn’t have put it into words then, I needed a new mystery.”

— John Fowles