Top 280 John Fowles Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Science disembodies; art embodies.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

203. “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

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

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

206. “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

207. “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

208. “Why should people have money if they don’t know how to use it?”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

210. “Despite all the identifying, measuring, photographing, I had managed to set the experience in a kind of present past, a having looked, even as I was temporally and physically still looking... It is not necessarily too little knowledge that causes ignorance; possessing too much, or wanting to gain too much, can produce the same result.”

— John Fowles

211. “But forgetting’s not something you do, it happens to you.”

— John Fowles

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

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

— John Fowles

217. “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

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

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

222. “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

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

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

225. “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

226. “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

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

— John Fowles

228. “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

229. “I don’t want to hurt you and the more I... want you, the more I shall. And I don’t want you to hurt me and the more you don’t want me the more you will.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

231. “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

232. “Accepting the sadness. Knowing that to pretend it was all gay was treachery. Treachery to everyone sad at the moment, everyone ever sad, treachery to such music, such truth.”

— John Fowles

233. “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

234. “The rebel with no specific gift for rebellion is destined to become the drone; and even this metaphor is inexact, since the drone has at least a small chance of fecundating the queen, whereas the human rebel-drone is deprived even of that small chance and may finally see himself as totally sterile, lacking not only the brilliant life-success of the queens but even the humble satisfactions of the workers in the human hive. Such.”

— John Fowles

235. “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

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

— John Fowles

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

240. “But the one perfume you really want is freedom.”

— John Fowles

241. “Another thing I said to Caliban the other day-we were listening to Jazz- I said, don’t you just dig this? And he says, in the garden. I said he was so square he was hardly credible. Oh, that, he said. Like rain, endless dreary rain. Color-killing.”

— John Fowles

242. “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

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

— John Fowles

244. “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

245. “Beware of the waiting room.” He closed the door at once, as if he had rehearsed that moment. I opened it quickly, and leaned out to call after him, “The what?” He turned, but only to give a sharp wave, the Trafalgar Square crowd swallowed him up. I couldn’t get the smile on his face out of my mind, it secreted an omission. Something he’d saved up, a mysterious last word. Waiting room. Waiting room. Waiting room. It went round in my head all that evening.”

— John Fowles

246. “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

247. “It was no good my knowing that old men have conned young ones like that ever since time began. I still fell for it, as one still falls for the oldest literary devices in the right hands and contexts.”

— John Fowles

248. “And I’ll tell you what a modern satyr is. He’s someone who invents a woman on paper so that he can force her to say and do things no real woman in her right mind ever would.”

— John Fowles

249. “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

250. “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