John Fowles Quotes

“There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves.”

— John Fowles

“I mean I never feel I feel what I ought to feel.”

— John Fowles

“It is me. I am his madness. For years he's been looking for something to put his madness into. And he found me.”

— John Fowles

“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.”

— John Fowles

“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.”

— John Fowles

“The evolution of human mentality has put us all in vitro now, behind the glass wall of our own ingenuity.”

— John Fowles

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.

— John Fowles

“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.”

— John Fowles

“It was like a journey into space. I was standing on Mars, knee-deep in thyme, under a sky that seemed never to have known dust or cloud.”

— John Fowles

“Laziness, I am afraid, was Charles's distinguishing trait.”

— John Fowles

Because I don't understand Him. Why He is, who He is, or how He is. And Maurice tells me I am quite intelligent. I think God must be very intelligent to be so much more intelligent than I am. To give me no clues. No certainties. No sights. No reasons. No motives.

— John Fowles

“Time is not a road - it is a room.”

— John Fowles

“There are two kinds of hangover: in one you feel ill and incapable, in the other you feel ill and lucid.”

— John Fowles