Quote

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

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
Tragedy
Courage
Millions
Evil
Good
Men

More quotes by John Fowles

Image
There are some men who are consoled by the idea that there are women less attractive than their wives and others who are haunted by the knowledge that there are more attractive.
John Fowles
Image
To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.
John Fowles
Image
Time is not a road - it is a room.
John Fowles
Image
The dead live. How do they live? By love.
John Fowles
Image
There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.
John Fowles
Image
Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.
John Fowles
Image
The American myth is of free will in its simple, primary sense. One can choose oneself and will oneself and this absurdly optimistic assumption so dominates the republic that it has bred all its gross social injustices.
John Fowles
Image
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.
John Fowles
Image
Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.
John Fowles
Image
Content is a word unknown to life it is also a word unknown to man.
John Fowles
Image
The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.
John Fowles
Image
Baseball and cricket are beautiful and highly stylized medieval war substitutes, chess made flesh, a mixture of proud chivalry and base-in both senses-greed.
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
Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.
John Fowles
Image
You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. One day you will know what that means, perhaps. And you will smile. Not against me. But with me.
John Fowles
Image
We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.
John Fowles
Image
You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts.
John Fowles
Image
We chase the reward, we get the reward and then we discover that the true reward is always the next reward. Buying pleasure is a false end.
John Fowles
Image
His statement to himself should have been, 'I possess this now, therefore I am happy', instead of what it so Victorianly was: I cannot possess this for ever, and therefore am sad.
John Fowles
Image
I am infinitely strange to myself.
John Fowles