438 Quotes by John Fowles

Just those three words, said and meant. I love you.They were quite hopeless. He said it as he might have said, I have cancer.His fairy story.

What you love is your own love. It's not love, it's selfishness. It's not me you think of, but what you feel about me.

Of course I looked sad. But I didn’t really feel sad. Or it wasn’t a sadness that hurt, not an all-through one. I rather enjoyed it. Beastly, but I did. I sang on the way home. The romance, the mystery of it. Living.

Accepting the sadness. Knowing that to pretend it was all gay was treachery. Treachery to everyone sad at the moment, everyone ever sad, treachery to such music, such truth.

We hardly said anything, we seemed to communicate through the chessmen, there was something very symbolic about my winning. That he wished me to feel. I don’t know what it was. I don’t know whether it was that he wanted me to see my “virtue” triumphed over his “vice” or something subtler, that sometimes losing is winning.

We shall never fully understand nature (or ourselves), and certainly never respect it, until we dissociate the wild from the notion of usability - however innocent and harmless the use. For it is the general uselessness of so much of nature that lies at the root of our ancient hostility and indifference to it.

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.

I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can't you understand? I don't think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a lot of nasty things are beautiful.

Everything free and decent in life is being locked away in filthy little cellars by beastly people who don't care.