Quotes by John Fowles

“But he was absolutely alone. No one ever wrote to him. Visited him. Totally alone. And I believe the happiest man I have ever met.”

“I suppose I'd had, by the standards of that pre-permissive time, a good deal of sex for my age. Girls, or a certain kind of girl, liked me; I had a car-not so common among undergraduates in those d...”

“Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you. ”

“I hate beyond hate.”

“She smiled at him as they waited for their dessert, her chin poised on her clasped hands.'You're being very silent.''That's how men cry.”

“Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the only thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the g...”

“Staring out to sea, I finally forced myself to stop thinking of her as someone still somewhere, if only in memory, still obscurely alive, breathing, doing, moving, but as a shovelful of ashes alrea...”

“A mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless... speci...”

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

“I was worse off than even Alison was; she hated life, I hated mysef. I had created nothing, I belonged to nothingness, to the nant, and it seemed to me that my own death was the only thing left tha...”

“If anything might hurt her, silence would; and I wanted to hurt her.”

“I needed a new mystery.”

“Think what it would be like if you got back to your island and there was no old man, no girl any more. No mysterious fun and games. The whole place locked up forever.”

“...there are times when silence is a poem.”

“Her stare fixed me. Without rancour and without regret; without triumph and without evil; as Desdemona once looked back on Venice. On the incomprehension, the baffled rage of Venice. I had taken my...”

“It's despair at the lack of (I'm cheating, I didn't say all these things - but I'm going to write what I want to say as well as what I did) feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair th...”

“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.”

“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.”

“If there is a God he's a great loathsome spider in the darkness.”

“People won't admit it, they're too busy grabbing to see that the lights have fused. They can't see the darkness and the spider-face beyond and the great web of it all. That there's always this if y...”