Quote

I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.

John Fowles

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

John Fowles
Age: 79 †
Born: 1926
Born: March 31
Died: 2005
Died: November 5
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Teacher
Writer
Leigh-on-Sea
Essex
Nothing
Great
Even
Insects
Things
Mercy
Think
Beyond
Thinking
Bits
Dies
Live

More quotes by John Fowles

Image
I have a strange illusion quite often. I think I've become deaf. I have to make a little noise to prove I'm not. I clear my throat to show myself that everything is normal. It's like the little Japanese girl they found in the ruins of Hiroshima. Everything dead and she was singing to her doll.
John Fowles
Image
Between skin and skin, there is only light.
John Fowles
Image
The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
John Fowles
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The absurdly neurotic role you and the rest of your kind have always attributed to me Erato, the Goddess Muse of Erotic Poetry bears no relation at all to reality. As a matter of fact, I was trained as a clinical psychologist. Who simply happens to have specialized in the mental illness that you, in your ignorance, call literature.
John Fowles
Image
We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.
John Fowles
Image
Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.
John Fowles
Image
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.
John Fowles
Image
All pasts are like poems one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.
John Fowles
Image
The profoundest distances are never geographical.
John Fowles
Image
The great majority of modern third-person narration is I narration very thinly disguised.
John Fowles
Image
There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.
John Fowles
Image
I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.
John Fowles
Image
All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
John Fowles
Image
If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence.
John Fowles
Image
He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.
John Fowles
Image
The practise of an art is essential to the whole man, not because of what art is but because of what art does to the artist.
John Fowles
Image
Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.' To live alone?' To live. With what you are.
John Fowles
Image
It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.
John Fowles