Quotes from The Collector

“I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Collector

“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, quote from The Collector

“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, quote from The Collector

“We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Collector

“It's despair at the lack of feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world. It's despair that perfectly normal young men can be made vicious and evil because they've won a lot of money. And then do what you've done to me.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Collector

“When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies”
― John Fowles, quote from The Collector

“Forgetting’s not something you do, it happens to you. Only it didn’t happen to me.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Collector

“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, quote from The Collector

“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, quote from The Collector

“The ordinary man is the curse of civilization.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Collector

“They're beautiful. But sad.'
Everything's sad if you make it so, I said.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Collector

“You must make, always. You must act, if you believe something. Talking about acting is like boasting about pictures you're going to paint. The most terrible bad form.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Collector

“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, quote from The Collector

“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, quote from The Collector

“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, quote from The Collector

“Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Collector

“It is me. I am his madness. For years he's been looking for something to put his madness into. And he found me.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Collector

“I must fight with my weapons. Not his. Not selfishness and brutality and shame and resentment.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Collector

“I mean I never feel I feel what I ought to feel.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Collector

“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, quote from The Collector

“The sky is absolutely empty. Beautifully pure and empty.

As if the architects and builders would live in all the houses they built! Or could live in them all. It's obvious, it stares you in the fact. There must be a God and he can't know anything about us.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Collector

“Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?”
― John Fowles, quote from The Collector

“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, quote from The Collector

“The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Collector

“8. You hate the political buisness of nationality. You hate everything, in politics and art and everything else, that is not genuine and deep and necessary. You don't have time for silly trivial things. You live seriously. You don't go to silly films, even if you want to; you don't read cheap newspapers; you don't listen to trash on the wireless and the telly; you don't waste time talking about nothing. You use your life.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Collector

“People who teach you cram old ideas, old views, old ways, into you. Like covering plants with layer after layer of old earth; it's no wonder the poor things so rarely come up fresh and green.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Collector

“Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you. ”
― John Fowles, quote from The Collector

“It’s rather like your voice. You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven’t any choice. But it’s what you say that counts. It’s what distinguishes all great art from the other kind.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Collector

“He's not human; he's an empty space disguised as a human.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Collector

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.