Quotes by John Fowles

About John Fowles:

John Robert Fowles was an English novelist of international stature, critically positioned between modernism and postmodernism. His work reflects the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, among others.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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 you will become. It is what you are and always will be. You are too young to know this. You are still becoming. Not being.

John Fowles

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 ma...

John Fowles

Because they died, we know we still live. 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, is.

John Fowles

And I envy you. You have the one thing that matters. You have all your discoveries before you.

John Fowles

He had the charm of all people who believe implicitly in themselves, that of integration.

John Fowles

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

John Fowles

The dead live." "How do they live?" "By love.

John Fowles

Think. In a minute from now you could be saying, I risked death. I threw for life, and I won life. It is a very wonderful feeling. To have survived.

John Fowles

I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness, to death.

John Fowles

She had something that is gone from the world, from the female world. A sweetness without sentimentality, a limpidity without naivety. She was so easy to hurt, to tease. And when she teased, it was like a caress.

John Fowles

When I was going on one day in the car about not having any close friends - using my favourite metaphor: the cage of glass between me and the rest of the world - she just laughed. 'You like it,' she said. 'You say you're isolated, boyo, but you reall...

John Fowles

The world began in hazard and will end in it.

John Fowles

To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.

John Fowles

I'm only happy when I forget to exist. When just my eyes or my ears or my skin exist.

John Fowles

You're not me. You can't feel like I feel." "I can feel." "No you can't. You just choose not to feel or something and everything's fine." "It's not fine. It's just not so bad.

John Fowles

Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?' 'For fun?' 'Fun!' He pounced on the word. 'Words are for truth. For facts. Not fiction.

John Fowles

Now I understand why you grow so many flowers." She shifted her head, not understanding. I said, "To cover the stink of sulphur.

John Fowles

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. ...

John Fowles

I don't believe in God. And I certainly don't feel chosen." "I think you may be." I smiled dubiously. "Thank you." "It is not meant as a compliment. Hazard makes you elect. You cannot elect yourself.

John Fowles

Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was incongenerous, its guilt irreducible, its sadness immortal; a bracelet of bright hair about the bone. I did not pray for her, because prayer has no efficacy; I did not cry ...

John Fowles

He stared to sea. "I gave up all ideas of practicing medicine. In spite of what I have just said about the wave and the water, in those years in France I am afraid I lived a selfish life. That is, I offered myself every pleasure. I traveled a great d...

John Fowles

Author Bio

  • NameJohn Fowles
  • DescriptionBritish writer
  • BornMarch 31, 1926
  • DiedNovember 5, 2005
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist; Teacher
  • WorksThe Collector; The Magus; The French Lieutenant's Woman