Quotes by John Fowles

M. I’ve never really thought of M objectively before, as another person. She’s always been my mother I’ve hated or been ashamed of. Yet of all the lame ducks I’ve met or heard of, she’s the lamest. I’ve never given her enough sympathy. I haven’t given her this last year (since I left home) one half of the consideration I’ve given the beastly creature upstairs just this last week. I feel that I could overwhelm her with love now. Because I haven’t felt so sorry for her for years. I’ve always excused myself—I’ve said, I’m kind and tolerant with everyone else, she’s the one person I can’t be like that with, and there has to be an exception to the general rule. So it doesn’t matter. But of course that’s wrong. She’s the last person that should be an exception to the general rule.Minny and I have so often despised D for putting up with her. We ought to go down onour knees to him.

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

He said, its rather like your voice. You put up with your voice and speak with it because you havent any choice. But its what you say that counts. Its what distinguishes all great art from the other kind.

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 to adhere to what touched her.

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.

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.

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 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.

He had not the benefit of existentialist terminology; but what he felt was a very clear case of the anxiety of freedom - that is, the realization that one is free and the realization that being free is a situation of terror

Labor is a man crowning glory.Not this mans.I quote MarxI raised my hands. The pickaxe handle had been rough.I quote blisters.

Everything free and decent in life is being locked away in filthy little cellars by beastly people who dont care.

Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependant upon it. Even though I arrange for a pleasure; and look forward to it, my eventual enjoyment of it is still a matter of hazard. Wherever time passes, there is hazard. You may die before you turn the next page.

What you love is your own love. Its not love, its selfishness. Its not me you think of, but what you feel about me.

A total stranger, and one not of ones sex, is often the least prejudiced judge.

The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.