John Fowles’ “The Magus” Quotes (21 Quotes)


    Wealth is a monster. It takes a month to learn to control it financially. And many years to learn to control it psychologically.


    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.

    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.

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



    There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves.

    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.

    To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.

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

    I could offer no consolation and I do not think he wanted any. There are situations in which consolation only threatens the equilibrium that time has instituted.

    I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.

    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.

    I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria.

    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.

    If Rome, a city of the vulgar living, had been depressing after Greece, London, a city of the drab dead, was fifty times worse.

    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.

    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.

    Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.

    A look I shall never forget, because it was almost one of hatred, and hatred in her face was like spite in the Virgen Mary's; it reversed the entire order of nature.



    More John Fowles Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Man - Death & Dying - Life - Time - Emotions - Smiling - Art - English - War & Peace - Literature - Society & Civilization - Nature - Beauty - Money & Wealth - Faces - World - Night - Reality - Poets - View All John Fowles Quotations

    More John Fowles Quotations (By Book Titles)


    - The Collector
    - The Magus

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