Top 280 John Fowles Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “He said, in some ways you’re older than I am. You’ve never been deeply in love. Perhaps you never will be. He said, love goes on happening to you. To men. You become twenty again, you suffer as twenty suffers. All the dotty irrationalities of twenty. I may seem very reasonable at the moment, but I don’t feel it. When you telephoned I nearly peed in my pants with excitement. I’m an old man in love. Stock comedy figure. Very stale. Not even funny.”

— John Fowles

253. “We were equally tired, in mid-century, of cold sanity and hot blasphemy; of the over-cerebral and of the over-faecal; the way out lay somewhere else. Words had lost their power, either for good or for evil; still hung, like a mist, over the reality of action, distorting, misleading, castrating; but at least since Hitler and Hiroshima they were seen to be a mist, a flimsy superstructure.”

— John Fowles

254. “Fluttering against the glass. Because I can see through it, I still think I can escape.”

— John Fowles

255. “The collection had the eclectic impersonality of a public library.”

— John Fowles

256. “It seemed sadistic, this last wasteland of days. It was as if Conchis, with Alison’s connivance, proceeded by some outmoded Victorian dietetic morality – one couldn’t have more jam, the sweetness of events, until one ate a lot more bread, the dry stodge of time.”

— John Fowles

257. “He is ugliness. But you can’t smash human ugliness.”

— John Fowles

258. “Charles called himself a Darwinist, and yet he had not really understood Darwin. But then, nor had Darwin himself.”

— John Fowles

259. “If I could put a starving child before him and give it food and let him watch it grow well, I know he’d give money. But everything beyond what he pays for and sees himself get is suspicious to him. He doesn’t believe in any other world but the one he lives in and sees. He’s the one in prison; in his own hateful narrow present world.”

— John Fowles

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

— John Fowles

261. “They did not kiss. They could not. How can you mercilessly imprison all natural sexual instinct for twenty years and then not expect the prisoner to be racked by sobs when the doors are thrown open?”

— John Fowles

262. “Of course I looked sad. But I didn’t really feel sad. Or it wasn’t a sadness that hurt, not an all-through one. I rather enjoyed it. Beastly, but I did. I sang on the way home. The romance, the mystery of it. Living.”

— John Fowles

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “They’re teaching you to express personality at the Slade – personality in general. But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it’s no go if your personality isn’t worth translating. It.”

— John Fowles

268. “That’s the great dead thing in him.”

— John Fowles

269. “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

270. “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

271. “Either you enlist under the kapetan, that murderer who knew only one word, but the only word, or you enlist under Anton. You watch and you despair. Or you despair and you watch. In the first case, you commit physical suicide; in the second, moral.”

— John Fowles

272. “Besides, in such wells of loneliness is not any coming together closer to humanity than perversity?”

— John Fowles

273. “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 if it never happened, it happened to someone else, and you start shrugging. You say, dingo it’s life, that’s the way things are. Stupid things like that. As if you haven’t really lost something forever.”

— John Fowles

274. “Boredom, the numbing, annual predictability of life hung over the staff like a cloud. And it was real boredom, not my modish ennui. From it flowed cant, hypocrisy, and the impotent rage of the old who know they have failed and the young who suspect that they will fail. The senior masters stood like Gallows sermons; with some of them one had a sort of vertigo, a glimpse of the bottomless pit of human futility.”

— John Fowles

275. “It was simple: one lived by irony and sentiment, one observed convention. What might have been was one more subject for detached and ironic observation; as was what might be. One surrendered, in other words; one learnt to be what one was.”

— John Fowles

276. “I had just written a letter to Alison, but already she seemed far away, not in distance, not in time, but in some dimension for which there is no name. Reality, perhaps.”

— John Fowles

277. “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

278. “If you are a real artist, you give your whole being to your art. Anything short of that, then you are not an artist.”

— John Fowles

279. “We are not even living in the past here. We are in the pluperfect.”

— John Fowles

280. “It may have something to do with intelligence, but I am certain it has nothing to do with knowledge – I mean that there are people who have an instinctive yet perfect moral judgment, who can perform the most complex ethical calculations as Indian peasants can sometimes perform astounding mathematical feats in a matter of seconds. Lily was such a person. And I craved her approval.”

— John Fowles

281. “Nothing is real. All is fiction. Somewhere there’s someone writing us, we’re not real. He or she decides who we are, what we do, all about us.”

— John Fowles

282. “These question-boundaries... are ours, not of reality. We are led to them, caged by them not only culturally and intellectually, but quite physically, by the restlessness of our eyes and their limited field and acuity of vision.”

— John Fowles

283. “Again, I had no feeling of the supernatural, no belief that this was more than another nasty twist in the masque, a black inversion of the scene on the beach. That does not mean I was not frightened. I was, and very frightened; but my fear came from a knowledge that anything might happen. That there were no limits in this masque, no normal social laws or conventions.”

— John Fowles

284. “Always I liked in them the things they didn’t want to be liked for.”

— John Fowles

285. “I could offer no consolation and I do not think he wanted any.”

— John Fowles

286. “I love honesty and freedom and giving. I love making, I love doing, I love being to the full.”

— John Fowles

287. “She would give herself violently, then yawn at the wrongest moment. She would spend all one day cleaning up the flat, cooking, ironing. Then, pass the next three or four Boheminanly on the floor in front of the fire, reading Lear, women’s magazines, a detective story, Hemingway. Not all at the same time, but bits of all in the same afternoon. She liked doing things, and only then finding a reason for doing them.”

— John Fowles

288. “We lack trust in the present, this moment, this actual seeing, because our culture tells us to trust only the reported back, the publicly framed, the edited, the thing set in the clearly artistic or the clearly scientific angle of perspective.”

— John Fowles

289. “She felt the speed of her fall accelerate. When the cruel ground rushes up, when the fall is from such a height, what use are precautions?”

— John Fowles

290. “Evolution had turned man into a sharply isolating creature, seeing the world not only anthropocentrically but singly, mirroring the way we like to think of our private selves.”

— John Fowles

291. “M. How do you think Christianity started? Or anything else? With a little group of people who didn’t give up hope.”

— John Fowles

292. “She liked doing things, and only then finding a reason for doing them.”

— John Fowles