Yuliia > Yuliia's Quotes

“There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.”
― John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman

“You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. One day you will know what that means, perhaps. And you will smile. Not against me. But with me.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“I am infinitely strange to myself.”
― John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman

“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 man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.”
― John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman

“We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“It's despair at the lack of feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. 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.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.'
To live alone?'
To live. With what you are.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke.
We're so weak physically, so helpless with things. Still, even today. But we're stronger than they are. We can stand their cruelty. They can't stand ours.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“I acquired expensive habits and affected manners. I got a third-class degree and a first-class illusion: that I was a poet. But nothing could have been less poetic that my seeing-through-all boredom with life in general and with making a living in particular. I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope-- an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all. But I did absorb a small dose of one permanently useful thing, Oxford's greatest gift to civilized life: Socratic honesty. It showed me, very intermittently, that it is not enough to revolt against one's past. One day I was outrageously bitter among some friends about the Army; back in my own rooms later it suddenly struck me that just because I said with impunity things that would have apoplexed my dead father, I was still no less under his influence. The truth was I was not a cynic by nature, only by revolt. I had got away from what I hated, but I hadn't found where I loved, and so I pretended that there was nowhere to love. Handsomely equipped to fail, I went out into the world.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“The dead live."
"How do they live?"
"By love.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“I read and I read; and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“If anything might hurt her, silence would; and I wanted to hurt her.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“They're beautiful. But sad.'
Everything's sad if you make it so, I said.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see relationship between objects. Whether the objects love each other, need each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women - and absurd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellow-men. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time; our sense of that, not a disinterested love of science, and certainly not wisdom, is why we devote such a huge proportion of the ingenuity and income of our societies to finding faster ways of doing things - as if the final aim of mankind was to grow closer not to a perfect humanity, but to a perfect lightning-flash.”
― John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman

“You must make, always. You must act, if you believe something. Talking about acting is like boasting about pictures you're going to paint. The most terrible bad form.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“We are all in flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo Sapiens.”
― John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman

“There are some men who are consoled by the idea that there are women less attractive than their wives; and others who are haunted by the knowledge that there are more attractive.”
― John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman

“There are many reasons why novelists write but they all have one thing in common a need to create an alternative world.”
― John Fowles

“They looked down on her; and she looked up through them.”
― John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman

“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, The Magus

“The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed--thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes--because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself--and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“I must fight with my weapons. Not his. Not selfishness and brutality and shame and resentment.”
― John Fowles, The Collector