Quote

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

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
Made
Greed
Chivalry
Chess
Mixture
Senses
Mixtures
Flesh
Medieval
Baseball
Cricket
Proud
Substitutes
War
Base
Beautiful
Highly
Stylized

More quotes by John Fowles

Image
I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry.
John Fowles
Image
Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.
John Fowles
Image
That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.
John Fowles
Image
Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls around its Versailles and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art.
John Fowles
Image
If you forget everything else about me, please remember this. I walked down that street and I never looked back and I love you. I love you. I love you so much that I shall hate you for ever for today.
John Fowles
Image
The newspapers are full of what we would like to happen to us and what we hope will never happen to us.
John Fowles
Image
I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope - an impotence, in short and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.
John Fowles
Image
Stained glass, engraved glass, frosted glass give me plain glass.
John Fowles
Image
Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependent on it. Even though I arrange for a pleasure, and look forward to it, my eventual enjoyment of it is still a matter of hazard. Wherever time passes, there is hazard.
John Fowles
Image
Wealth is a monster. It takes a month to learn to control it financially. And many years to learn to control it psychologically.
John Fowles
Image
I am one in a row of specimens. It's when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I'm meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive. but it's the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead.
John Fowles
Image
I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.
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
I am going to explain to you why we went to war. Why mankind always goes to war. It is not social or political. It is not countries that go to war, but men. It is like salt. Once one has been to war, one has salt for the rest of one's life. Do you understand?
John Fowles
Image
The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke. We're so weak physically, so helpless with things. Still, even today. But we're stronger than they are. We can stand their cruelty. They can't stand ours.
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
Ask me to marry you. Will you marry me? No.
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
Content is a word unknown to life it is also a word unknown to man.
John Fowles
Image
One degrades oneself sometimes in the effort not to be lonely.
John Fowles