John Fowles Quotes - Page 2

I want to tell you what's really happened."

"Not now. Please not now. Whatever's happened, come and make love to me."

And we did make love; not sex, but love; though sex would have been so much wiser.

In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love.

The moon hung over the planet Earth, a dead thing over a dying thing.

The evolution of human mentality has put us all in vitro now, behind the glass wall of our own ingenuity.

I knew that on that island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so few meetings that one too easily saw out of the present, and then the past seemed ten times closer than it was.

You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it...fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf - your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in the flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo sapiens.

The human race is unimportant. It is the self that must not be betrayed."

"I suppose one could say that Hitler didn't betray his self."

"You are right. He did not. But millions of Germans did betray their selves. That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.

The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed-thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes-because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself-and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud.

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

Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?

But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating.

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.

Love is the mistery between two people, not the identity. We were at the opposite poles of humanity. Lily was humanity bound to duty, unable to choose, suffering, at the mercy of social ideals.
Humanity both crucified and marching towards the cross. And I was free, I was Peter three times to renounce - determined to survive, whatever the cost.

Oh,clever... what's the use of that? Are they human beings?

Sometimes I almost pity them. I think I have a freedom they cannot understand. No insult, no blame can touch me. Because I have set myself beyond the pale. I am nothing, I am hardly human any more. I am the French Lieutenant’s Whore.

Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.

For him the tragedy of Homo sapiens is that the least fit to survive breed the most.

Sıradan insan uygarlığın lanetidir.

Stop thinking about class, she'd say. Like a rich man telling a poor man to stop thinking about money.

The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke.