Quotes From "The Magus" By John Fowles

He stared to sea. "I gave up all ideas of practicing medicine. In spite of what I have just said about the wave and the water, in those years in France I am afraid I lived a selfish life. That is, I offered myself every pleasure. I traveled a great deal. I lost some money dabbling in the theatre, but I made much more dabbling on the Bourse. I gained a great many amusing friends, some of whom are now quite famous. But I was never very happy. I suppose I was fortunate. It took me only five years to discover what some rich people never discover – that we all have a certain capacity for happiness and unhappiness. And that the economic hazards of life do not seriously affect it. John Fowles

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

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. John Fowles

To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape. And my feelings, at the end of that wretched term, were those of a man who knows he's in a cage, exposed to the jeers of all his old ambitions until he dies. John Fowles

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 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

Men see objects, women see the relationship between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love 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 abusrd. 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

I'm only happy when I forget to exist. When just my eyes or my ears or my skin exist. John Fowles

I knew that on that island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so few meetings that one too easily saw out of the present, and then the past seemed ten times closer than it was. John Fowles

Girls possess sexual tact in inverse proportion to their standard of education. John Fowles

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. John Fowles

In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love. John Fowles

Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish if we are to live in society. It is one I have long ago banished from my life. You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. John Fowles

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. John Fowles

Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth. John Fowles

But he was absolutely alone. No one ever wrote to him. Visited him. Totally alone. And I believe the happiest man I have ever met. John Fowles

I suppose I'd had, by the standards of that pre-permissive time, a good deal of sex for my age. Girls, or a certain kind of girl, liked me; I had a car-not so common among undergraduates in those days-and I had some money. I wasn't ugly; and even more important, I had my loneliness, which, as every cad knows, is a deadly weapon with women. My 'technique' was to make a show of unpredictability, cynicism, and indifference. Then, like a conjurer with his white rabbit, I produced the solitary heart. John Fowles

A mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless... speciesless. John Fowles

He had the charm of all people who believe implicitly in themselves, that of integration. John Fowles

I was worse off than even Alison was; she hated life, I hated mysef. I had created nothing, I belonged to nothingness, to the néant, and it seemed to me that my own death was the only thing left that I could create. John Fowles

I needed a new mystery. John Fowles

Think what it would be like if you got back to your island and there was no old man, no girl any more. No mysterious fun and games. The whole place locked up forever. John Fowles

Her stare fixed me. Without rancour and without regret; without triumph and without evil; as Desdemona once looked back on Venice. On the incomprehension, the baffled rage of Venice. I had taken myself to be in some way the traitor Iago punished, in an unwritten sixth act. Chained in hell. But I was also Venice; the state left behind; the thing journeyed from. John Fowles

The height the dupe has fallen is measured by his anger. John Fowles

You're not me. You can't feel like I feel."" I can feel."" No you can't. You just choose not to feel or something and everything's fine."" It's not fine. It's just not so bad. John Fowles

Staring out to sea, I finally forced myself to stop thinking of her as someone still somewhere, if only in memory, still obscurely alive, breathing, doing, moving, but as a shovelful of ashes already scattered; as a broken link, a biological dead end, an eternal withdrawal from reality, a once complex object that now dwindled, dwindled, left nothing behind except a l like a fallen speck of soot on a blank sheet of paper. John Fowles

If anything might hurt her, silence would; and I wanted to hurt her. John Fowles

...there are times when silence is a poem. John Fowles

And I envy you. You have the one thing that matters. You have all your discoveries before you. John Fowles

That is how war corrupts us. It plays on our pride in our own free will. John Fowles

So that the smile was not so much an attitude to be taken to life as the nature of the cruelty of life, a cruelty we cannot even choose to avoid, since it is human existence. 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

The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night? John Fowles

He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal. 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

Sometimes to return is a vulgarity. John Fowles

The dead live." "How do they live?" "By love. John Fowles

Labor is a man crowning glory."" Not this man's."" I quote Marx"I raised my hands. The pickaxe handle had been rough." I quote blisters. John Fowles

The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself. John Fowles

Death starves us of life. So we learn to fabricate our own immortalities. John Fowles

Now I understand why you grow so many flowers." She shifted her head, not understanding. I said, "To cover the stink of sulphur. John Fowles

There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be. You are too young to know this. You are still becoming. Not being. John Fowles

I had always believed, and not only out of cynicism, that a man and a woman could tell in the first ten minutes whether they wanted to go to bed together; and that the time that passed after those first ten minutes represented a tax, which might be worth paying if the article promised to be really enjoyable, but which nine times out of ten became rapidly excessive. John Fowles

It was an unforgettable painting; it set a dense golden halo of light round the most trivial of moments, so that the moment, and all such moments, could never be completely trivial again. John Fowles