John Fowles Quotes

One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.

The diary will really try and tell people who you are and what you were. The alternative is writing nothing, or creating a totally lifeless, as it is leafless, garden.

Cricket remains for me the game of games, the sanspareil, the great metaphor, the best marriage ever devised of mind and body… For me it remains the Proust of pastimes, the subtlest and most poetic, the most past-and-present; whose beauty can lie equally in days, in a whole, or in one tiny phrase, a blinding split second.

In essence the Renaissance was simply the green end of one of civilization’s hardest winters.

That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see the relationship between objects… It is an extra dimension of feeling which we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women—and absurd.

All perfect republics are a perfect nonsense. The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night ?