John Fowles

The dead live." "How do they live?" "By love.

Sometimes to return is a vulgarity.

I must fight with my weapons. Not his. Not selfishness and brutality and shame and resentment.

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.

But she finally had the good sense to see that a long, dull and predictable future was an expensive price to pay for the satisfaction of a passing sexual attraction.

I left a pause. __ou sound like a certain kind of surgeon. A lot more interested in the operation than the patient._ __ should not like to be in the hands of a surgeon who did not take that view.

Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was incongenerous, its guilt irreducible, its sadness immortal; a bracelet of bright hair about the bone.

and like most people who have spent much of their adult life being emotionally dishonest, I overcalculated the sympathy a final being honest would bring

In spite of her superficial independence, her fundamental need was to cling.All her life was an attempt to disprove it; and so proved it. She was like a sea anemone -- had only to be touched once to adhere to what touched her.

He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.

He said, 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.

The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?

M. I__e never really thought of M objectively before, as another person. She__ always been my mother I__e hated or been ashamed of. Yet of all the lame ducks I__e met or heard of, she__ the lamest. I__e never given her enough sympathy. I haven__ given her this last year (since I left home) one half of the consideration I__e given the beastly creature upstairs just this last week. I feel that I could overwhelm her with love now. Because I haven__ felt so sorry for her for years. I__e always excused myself____e said, I__ kind and tolerant with everyone else, she__ the one person I can__ be like that with, and there has to be an exception to the general rule. So it doesn__ matter. But of course that__ wrong. She__ the last person that should be an exception to the general rule.Minny and I have so often despised D for putting up with her. We ought to go down onour knees to him.

I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness, to death.

Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.

Think. In a minute from now you could be saying, I risked death. I threw for life, and I won life. It is a very wonderful feeling. To have survived.

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.

Because they died, we know we still live. Because a star explodes and a thousand worlds like ours die, we know this world is. That is the smile: that what might not be, is.