John Fowles
Forgetting’s not something you do, it happens to you. Only it didn’t happen to me.Collection: Forget
These last few days I've felt Godless. I've felt cleaner, less muddled, less blind. I still believe in a God. But he's so remote, so cold, so mathematical. I see that we have to live as if there is no God. Prayer and worship and singing hymns-all silly and useless.Collection: God
There are some men who are consoled by the idea that there are women less attractive than their wives; and others who are haunted by the knowledge that there are more attractive.Collection: Men
Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.Collection: Love Is
The world began in hazard and will end in it.Collection: Hazards
The privileges of knowledge have to be bought at the cost of the consolations of ignorance.Collection: Ignorance
To despise all effort is the greatest effort of all.Collection: Effort
Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?Collection: Drinking
But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating.Collection: Personality
The practise of an art is essential to the whole man, not because of what art is but because of what art does to the artist.Collection: Art
Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.Collection: Real
That’s the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.Collection: Romance