438 Quotes by John Fowles

It’s like football. Two sides may each want to beat the other, they may even hate each other as sides, but if someone came and told them football is stupid and not worth playing or caring about, then they’d feel together. It’s feeling that matters.

The last I saw of him was of a dark blue back marching towards Shaftesbury Avenue; eternally the victor in a war where the losers win.

That’s the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.

Long afterwards I realized why some men, racing drivers and their like, become addicted to speed. There are those of us who never see death ahead, but eternally behind: in any moment that stops and thinks.

I happily forgot his little collection of crimped and cramped fruit trees in my own new world, my America of endless natural ones in Devon.

Why should people have money if they don’t know how to use it?

Charles did not know it, but in those brief poised seconds above the waiting sea, in that luminous evening silence broken only by the waves’ quiet wash, the whole Victorian Age was lost. And I do not mean he had taken the wrong path.

He said it as if ‘very rich’ was a nationality; as perhaps it is.

No religion is the only religion, no church the true church.