Quotes from The Magus

“The human race is unimportant. It is the self that must not be betrayed."

"I suppose one could say that Hitler didn't betray his self."

"You are right. He did not. But millions of Germans did betray their selves. 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, quote from The Magus

“To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Magus

“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, quote from The Magus

“The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Magus

“Between skin and skin, there is only light.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Magus

“Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.'
To live alone?'
To live. With what you are.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Magus

“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, quote from The Magus

“The dead live."
"How do they live?"
"By love.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Magus

“I acquired expensive habits and affected manners. I got a third-class degree and a first-class illusion: that I was a poet. But nothing could have been less poetic that my seeing-through-all boredom with life in general and with making a living in particular. 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. But I did absorb a small dose of one permanently useful thing, Oxford's greatest gift to civilized life: Socratic honesty. It showed me, very intermittently, that it is not enough to revolt against one's past. One day I was outrageously bitter among some friends about the Army; back in my own rooms later it suddenly struck me that just because I said with impunity things that would have apoplexed my dead father, I was still no less under his influence. The truth was I was not a cynic by nature, only by revolt. I had got away from what I hated, but I hadn't found where I loved, and so I pretended that there was nowhere to love. Handsomely equipped to fail, I went out into the world.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Magus

“Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Magus

“He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Magus

“If anything might hurt her, silence would; and I wanted to hurt her.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Magus

“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, quote from The Magus

“It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Magus

“Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see relationship between objects. Whether the objects love each other, need each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women - and absurd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellow-men. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Magus

“The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?”
― John Fowles, quote from The Magus

“It came to me…that I didn't want to be anywhere else in the world at that moment, that what I was feeling at that moment justified all I had been through, because all I had been through was my being there. I was experiencing…a new self-acceptance, a sense that I had to be this mind and this body, its vices and its virtues, and that I had no other chance or choice.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Magus

“Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Magus

“There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Magus

“The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed--thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes--because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself--and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Magus

“One of the great fallacies of our time is that the Nazis rose to power because they imposed order on chaos. Precisely the opposite is true - they were successful because they imposed chaos on order. They tore up the commandments, they denied the super-ego, what you will. They said, "You may persecute the minority, you may kill, you may torture, you may couple and breed without love." They offered humanity all its great temptations. Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Magus

“The world began in hazard and will end in it.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Magus

“The bowed head, the buried face. She is silent, she will never speak, never forgive, never reach a hand, never leave this frozen present tense. All waits, suspended. Suspended the autumn trees, the autumn sky, anonymous people. A blackbird, poor fool, sings out of season from the willows by the lake. A flight of pigeons over the houses; fragments of freedom, hazard, an anagram made flesh. And somewhere the stinging smell of burning leaves.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Magus

“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. You are too young to know this. You are still becoming. Not being.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Magus

“...all cynicism masks a failure to cope.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Magus

“cras amet qui numquam amavit quique amavit cras amet.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Magus

“We lay on the ground and kissed. Perhaps you smile. That we only lay on the ground and kissed. You young people can lend your bodies now, play with them, give them as we could not. But remember that you have paid a price: that of a world rich in mystery and delicate emotion. It is not only species of animal that die out. But whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know. But pity yourself for what it did.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Magus

“Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.”
― John Fowles, quote from The Magus

“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, quote from The Magus

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Popular quotes

“Let's get it over with, so I can stop wondering. How many have there been?"
Lauren stared at him."How many what?"
"Lovers," he clarified bitterly.
She could hardly believe her ears. After treating her as if her standards of morality were childish, after acting as if promiscuity was a virtue, after telling her how man preferred experienced women, he was jealous. Because now he cared.
Lauren didn't know whether to hit him, burst out laughing or hug him. Instead she decided to exact just a tiny bit of revenge for all the misery and uncertainty he had put her through. Turning,she walked over to the bar and reached for a bottle of white wine. "Why should the number make any difference?" she asked innocently. "You told me in Harbor Springs that men don't prize virginity anymore, that they don't expect or want a woman to be inexperienced.Right?"
"Right," he said grimly, glowering at the ice cubes in his glass.
"You also said," she continued, biting back a smile, "that women have the same physical desires men have,and that we have the right to satisfy them with whomever we wish.You were very emphatic about that-"
"Lauren," he warned in a low voice, "I asked you a simple question. I don't care what the answer is, I just want an answer so I can stop wondering. Tell me how many there were. Tell me if you liked the, if you didn't give a damn abou them,or if you did it to get even with me.Just tell me.I won't hold it against you."
Like hell you wouldn't! Lauren thought happily as she struggled to uncork the bottle of wine. "Of course you won't hold it against me," she said lightly. "You specifically said-"
"I know what I said," he snapped tersely. "Now,how many?"
She flicked a glance in his direction, implying that she was bewildered by his tone. "Only one."
Angry regret flared in his eyes,and his body tensed as if he had just felt a physical blow. "Did you...care about him?"
"I thought I loved him at the time," Lauren said brightly, twisting the corkscrew deeper into the cork.
"All right.Let's forget him," Nick said curtly. He finally noticed her efforts with the wine bottle and walked over to help her.
"Are you going to be able to forget him?" Lauren asked, admiring the ease with which he managed the stubborn cork.
"I will...after a while."
"What do you mean,after a while? You said there was nothing promiscuous about a woman satisfying her biological-"
"I know what I said,dammit!"
"Then why do you look so angry? You didn't lie to me,did you?"
"I didn't lie," he said, slamming the bottle onto the bar and reaching for a glass from the cabinet. "I believed it at the time."
"Why?" she goaded.
"Because it was convenient to believe it," he bit out. "I was not in love with you then."
Lauren loved him more at that moment than ever. "Would you like me to tell you about him?"
"No," he said coldly.
Her eyes twinkled, but she backed a cautious step out of his reach. "You would have approved of him. He was tall, dark, and handsome, like you. Very elegant,sophisticated and experienced. He wore down my resistence in two days,and-"
"Dammit, stop it!" Nick grated in genuine fury.
"His name is John."
Nick braced both hands on the liguor cabinet,his back to her. "I do not want to hear this!"
"John Nicholas Sinclair," Lauren clarified.”
― Judith McNaught, quote from Double Standards

“Even until quite recently, many of the world’s inhabitants were not quite sure of what country they were citizens, or why it should matter. My mother, who was born a Jew in Poland, once told me a joke from her childhood: There was a small town located along the frontier between Russia and Poland; no one was ever quite sure to which it belonged. One day an official treaty was signed and not long after, surveyors arrived to draw a border. Some villagers approached them where they had set up their equipment on a nearby hill. “So where are we, Russia or Poland?” “According to our calculations, your village now begins exactly thirty-seven meters into Poland.” The villagers immediately began dancing for joy. “Why?” the surveyors asked. “What difference does it make?” “Don’t you know what this means?” they replied. “It means we’ll never have to endure another one of those terrible Russian winters!”
― David Graeber, quote from Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“It's not that the Democrats are playing checkers and the Republicans are playing chess. It's that the Republicans are playing chess and the Democrats are in the nurse's office because once again they glued their balls to their thighs.”
― Jon Stewart, quote from America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction

“Of course Mason and Logan followed me where I went.”
― Tijan, quote from Fallen Crest Public

“...that no matter how good their intentions, with absolute power comes corruption.”
― Gennifer Albin, quote from Crewel

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