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184bc35
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She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.' 'Prose and pudding?' 'I don't expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.
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romantic
poetry
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John Fowles |
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07416a7
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Stop thinking about class, she'd say. Like a rich man telling a poor man to stop thinking about money.
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money
privilege
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John Fowles |
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534d743
|
I am Emma Woodhouse. I feel for her, of her and in her. I have a different sort of snobbism, but I understand her snobbism. Her priggishness. I admire it. I know she does wrong things, she tries to organize other people's lives, she can't see Mr Knightley is a man in a million. She's temporarily silly, yet all the time one knows she's basically intelligent. Creative, determined to set the highest standards. A real human being.
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jane-austen
intelligence
mr-knightley
snobbery
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John Fowles |
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365c5ee
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You will see that Charles set his sights high. Intelligent idlers always have, in order to justify their idleness to their intelligence.
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John Fowles |
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0902845
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All of us are failures; we all die. Nobody wants to be a nobody. All our acts are partly devised to fill or to mask the emptiness we feel at the core. We all like to be loved or hated; it is a sign that we shall be remembered, that we did not 'not exist'. For this reason, many unable to create love have created hate. That too is remembered.
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John Fowles |
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588f238
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Our stereotyping societies force us to feel more alone. They stamp masks on us and isolate out real selves. We all live in two worlds: the old comfortable man-centred world of absolutes and the harsh real world of relatives. The latter, the relativity reality, terrifies us; and isolates and dwarfs us all.
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John Fowles |
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510e6a1
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You may wonder how I had not seen it before. I believe I had. But to see something is not the same as to acknowledge it.
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John Fowles |
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f159201
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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."
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sex
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John Fowles |
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1ce0c07
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I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria.
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John Fowles |
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df3c20c
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You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be.
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John Fowles |
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7e8df6c
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There were minutes of silence then and in them I thought about the only truth that mattered, the only morality that mattered, the only sin, the only crime. When Lily de Seitas had told me her version of it at the end of our meeting at the museum I had taken it as a retrospective thing, a comment on my past and on my anecdote about the butcher. But I saw now it had been about my future. History has superseded the ten commandments of the Bib..
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John Fowles |
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32fc9f5
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Thus it had come about that she had read far more fiction, and far more poetry, those two sanctuaries of the lonely, than most of her kind.
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loneliness
poetry
quote
lonely
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John Fowles |
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49facfa
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He is the same, but everything is different.
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John Fowles |
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6220df6
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The only thing that really matters is feeling and living what you believe - so long as it's something more than belief in your own comfort.
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John Fowles |
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2d6f5a9
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It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world. It's despair that perfectly normal young men can be made vicious and evil because they've won a lot of money. And then do what you've done to me.
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the-collector
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John Fowles |
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27b6058
|
The second cause of failure to enact good stems from conflict of intention. High intelligence leads to multiplicity of interest and a sharpened capacity to foresee the consequences of any action. Will is lost in a labyrinth of hypothesis.
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John Fowles |
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c43e7ab
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He said, I suppose there are people who are purely moved by great art. I never met a painter who was. I'm not. All I think of when I see that picture is that it has the supreme mastery I have spent all my life trying to attain. And shall not. Ever.
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John Fowles |
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de18fd6
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How I hate ignorance! Caliban's ignorance, my ignorance, the world's ignorance! Oh, I could learn and learn and learn and learn. I could cry, I want to learn so much.
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John Fowles |
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05e7778
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if you knew the mess my life was in ... the waste of it ... the uselessness of it. I have no moral purpose, no real sense of duty to anything. It seems only a few months ago that I was twenty-one - full of hopes ... all disappointed.
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John Fowles |
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2a7a0fa
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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.
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description
uniqueness
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John Fowles |
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bfbfce6
|
Nu poti sa urasti pe cineva deja infrant.Care, fara tine, nu va mai fi niciodata om intreg.
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John Fowles |
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9793e93
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I needed a new mystery.
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mystery
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John Fowles |
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be752b6
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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 really think you're different.
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friendlessness
isolation
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John Fowles |
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c16d475
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No doubt our accepting what we are must always inhibit our being what we ought to be.
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John Fowles |
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30f7b0f
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He had the charm of all people who believe implicitly in themselves, that of integration.
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confidence
integration
charm
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John Fowles |
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ffd264f
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I did not pray for her, because prayer has no efficacy; I did not cry for her, or for myself, because only extroverts cry twice; but I sat in the silence of that night, that infinite hostility to man, to permanence, to love, remembering her, remembering her.
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John Fowles |
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4be798d
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Maurice once said to me- when I had asked him a question rather like yours - he said, "An answer is always a form of death" There was something else in her face then. It was not implaceable; but in some way impermeable. 'I think questions are a form of life"
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John Fowles |
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025cb11
|
Vot ona, istina. Ne v serpe i molote. Ne v zvezdakh i polosakh. Ne v raspiatii. Ne v solntse. Ne v zolote. Ne v in' i ian. V ulybke.
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smile
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John Fowles |
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7079a75
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I saw that this cataclysm must be an expiation for some barbarous crime of civilization, some terrible human lie. What the lie was, I had too little knowledge of history or science to know then. I know now it was our believing that we were fulfilling some end, serving some plan - that all would come out well in the end, because there was some great plan over all. Instead of the reality. There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing th..
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war
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John Fowles |
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feefd16
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I said earlier that we are all poets, though not many of us write poetry; and so are we all novelists, that is, we have a habit of writing fictional futures for ourselves, although perhaps today we incline more to put ourselves into a film. We screen in our minds hypotheses about how we might behave, about what might happen to us; and these novelistic or cinematic hypotheses often have very much more effect on how we actually do behave, whe..
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John Fowles |
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fc9b9be
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I love honesty and freedom and giving. I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.
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John Fowles |
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5249bff
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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.
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irony
truth
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John Fowles |
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936eb97
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I'm not really sorry. But I'm not absolutely unsorry.
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John Fowles |
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46d8b73
|
The noblest relationship is marriage, that is, love. Its nobility resides in its altruism, the desire to serve another beyond all the pleasures of the relationship; and in its refusal ever to regard the other as a thing, an object, a utilizability. Sex is an exchange of pleasures, of needs; love is a giving without return. It is this giving without return, this helping without reward, this surplus of pure good, that identifies the uniquenes..
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John Fowles |
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3bb9d0e
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When she went out she used to wear a lot of eye shadow, which married with the sulky way she sometimes held her mouth to give her a characteristic bruised look; a look that subtly made one want to bruise her more.
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looks
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John Fowles |
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760e911
|
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 other kind.
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personality
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John Fowles |
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52aeb89
|
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.
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irony
independence
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John Fowles |
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88a13f9
|
Sometimes to return is a vulgarity.
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perfection
return
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John Fowles |
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5babfd1
|
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.
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conformists
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John Fowles |
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6e3d43d
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Between skin and skin there is only light. And there was my poetry.
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John Fowles |
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62c19bd
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Poetry had always seemed something I could turn to in need - an emergency exit, a lifebuoy, as well as a justification.
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John Fowles |
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d2dc9a8
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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 for her, because only extroverts cry twice; I sat in the silence of that night, that infinite hostility to man, to permanence, to love, remembering her, remembering her.
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mourning
grief
loss
desolation
|
John Fowles |
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ef219a9
|
She was a mirror that did not lie; whose interest in me was real; whose love was real.
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John Fowles |
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e697d42
|
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 flight from the real reality. That is a basic definition of Homo sapiens.
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John Fowles |