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

John Fowles

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John Fowles
Age: 79 †
Born: 1926
Born: March 31
Died: 2005
Died: November 5
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Teacher
Writer
Leigh-on-Sea
Essex
Sometimes
Degrades
Degrade
Lonely
Oneself
Effort

More quotes by John Fowles

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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.
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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.
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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.
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I knew words were like chains, they held me back . . . the act of description taints the description.
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I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren't ashamed of being dull and little.
John Fowles
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I read and I read and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.
John Fowles
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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
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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.
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Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.
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The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
John Fowles
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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.
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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
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Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.
John Fowles
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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
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He is solid immovable, iron-willed. He showed me one day his killing bottle. I'm imprisoned in it. Fluttering against the glass. Because I can see through it I still think I can escape. I have hope. But it's all an illusion. A thick round wall of glass.
John Fowles
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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
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The profoundest distances are never geographical.
John Fowles
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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.
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The newspapers are full of what we would like to happen to us and what we hope will never happen to us.
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The best wines take the longest to mature.
John Fowles