Quotes by John Fowles

“I could scream abuse at him all day long; he wouldn't mind at all. It's me he wants, my look, my outside; not my emotions or my mind or my soul or even my body. Not anything human.”

“People who teach you cram old ideas, old views, old ways, into you. Like covering plants with layer after layer of old earth; it's no wonder the poor things so rarely come up fresh and green.”

“The river of life, of mysterious laws and mysterious choice, flows past a deserted embankment; and along that other deserted embankment Charles now begins to pace, a man behind the invisible gun ca...”

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

“It's like the day you realize dolls are dolls. I pick up my old self and I see it's silly. A toy I've played with too often. It's a little sad, like an old golliwog at the bottom of the cupboard. I...”

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

“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....”

“M. Ive never really thought of M objectively before, as another person. Shes always been my mother Ive hated or been ashamed of. Yet of all the lame ducks Ive met or heard of, shes the lamest. Ive ...”

“The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?”

“He said, it's rather like your voice. You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts. It's what distinguishes all great art from the ...”

“He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.”

“In spite of her superficial independence, her fundamental need was to cling.All her life was an attempt to disprove it; and so proved it. She was like a sea anemone -- had only to be touched once t...”

“and like most people who have spent much of their adult life being emotionally dishonest, I overcalculated the sympathy a final being honest would bring”

“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.”

“But she finally had the good sense to see that a long, dull and predictable future was an expensive price to pay for the satisfaction of a passing sexual attraction.”

“I left a pause. You sound like a certain kind of surgeon. A lot more interested in the operation than the patient. I should not like to be in the hands of a surgeon who did not take that view.”

“I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks; I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry.”

“I must fight with my weapons. Not his. Not selfishness and brutality and shame and resentment.”

“Sometimes to return is a vulgarity.”

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