Fowles Magus Quotes

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

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.

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.

The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.

Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.' To live alone?' To live. With what you are.

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.

Between skin and skin, there is only light.

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

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

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

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.

If anything might hurt her, silence would; and I wanted to hurt her.

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.

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.

Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.

The world began in hazard and will end in it.

...there are times when silence is a poem.

Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.

cras amet qui numquam amavit quique amavit cras amet.

The profoundest distances are never geographical.

...all cynicism masks a failure to cope.

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.

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.

You're not me. You can't feel like I feel." "I can feel." "No you can't. You just choose not to feel or something and everything's fine." "It's not fine. It's just not so bad.

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.

I'm only happy when I forget to exist. When just my eyes or my ears or my skin exist.

If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence.

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.

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.

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

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.

Ask me to marry you." "Will you marry me?" "No.

And I envy you. You have the one thing that matters. You have all your discoveries before you.

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

Utram bibis? Aquam an undam? What are you drinking? The water or the wave?

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.

She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.' 'Prose and pudding?' 'I don't expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.

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.

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.

I know what it's like when people go away. It's agony for a week, then painful for a week, then you begin to forget, and then it seems as it never happened, it happened to someone else, and you start shrugging. You say, dingo, it's life, that's the way the things are. Stupid things like that. As if you haven't really lost something for ever.

No doubt our accepting what we are must always inhibit our being what we ought to be.

I was worse off than even Alison was; she hated life, I hated mysef. I had created nothing, I belonged to nothingness, to the néant, and it seemed to me that my own death was the only thing left that I could create.

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.

Between skin and skin there is only light. And there was my poetry.

I needed a new mystery.

Girls possess sexual tact in inverse proportion to their standard of education.

It was too exactly as imagined to be true. But I felt as gladly and expectantly disorientated, as happily and alertly alone, as Alice in Wonderland.

He had the charm of all people who believe implicitly in themselves, that of integration.

Poetry had always seemed something I could turn to in need - an emergency exit, a lifebuoy, as well as a justification.

She had something that is gone from the world, from the female world. A sweetness without sentimentality, a limpidity without naivety. She was so easy to hurt, to tease. And when she teased, it was like a caress.

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.

She was a mirror that did not lie; whose interest in me was real; whose love was real.

You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be.

It was an unforgettable painting; it set a dense golden halo of light round the most trivial of moments, so that the moment, and all such moments, could never be completely trivial again.

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.

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.

Sometimes to return is a vulgarity.

- Вот она, истина. Не в серпе и молоте. Не в звездах и полосах. Не в распятии. Не в солнце. Не в золоте. Не в инь и ян. В улыбке.

I don't believe in God. And I certainly don't feel chosen." "I think you may be." I smiled dubiously. "Thank you." "It is not meant as a compliment. Hazard makes you elect. You cannot elect yourself.

Victims?" "Whatever you call people who are made to suffer without being given the choice." "That sounds like an excellent definition of man.

Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?

Nu poti sa urasti pe cineva deja infrant.Care, fara tine, nu va mai fi niciodata om intreg.

There are three types of intelligent persons: the first so intelligent that being called very intelligent must seem natural and obvious; the second sufficiently intelligent to see that he is being flattered, not described; the third so little intelligent that he will believe anything. I knew I belonged to the second kind.

I want to tell you what's really happened." "Not now. Please not now. Whatever's happened, come and make love to me." And we did make love; not sex, but love; though sex would have been so much wiser.

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.

Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?' 'For fun?' 'Fun!' He pounced on the word. 'Words are for truth. For facts. Not fiction.

If you are wise, you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.

It was not the mask I was afraid of...but of what lay behind the mask. The eternal source of all fear, all horror, all real evil, man himself

When you love me, it’s as if God forgave me for being the mess I am.

Utram bibis? Aquam an undam? Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?

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.

Maurice once said to me- when I had asked him a question rather like yours - he said, "An answer is always a form of death" There was something else in her face then. It was not implaceable; but in some way impermeable. 'I think questions are a form of life

When she went out she used to wear a lot of eye shadow, which married with the sulky way she sometimes held her mouth to give her a characteristic bruised look; a look that subtly made one want to bruise her more.

Ever read this?" "Let's cut corners. To hell with literature. You're clever and I'm beautiful. Now let's talk about who we really are.

What had always attracted me in the opposite sex was what they tried to hide, what provoked all the metaphorical equivalents of seducing them out of their clothes into nakedness.

He said it as if ‘very rich’ was a nationality; as perhaps it is.

I did not pray for her, because prayer has no efficacy; I did not cry for her, or for myself, because only extroverts cry twice; but I sat in the silence of that night, that infinite hostility to man, to permanence, to love, remembering her, remembering her.

Her stare fixed me. Without rancour and without regret; without triumph and without evil; as Desdemona once looked back on Venice. On the incomprehension, the baffled rage of Venice. I had taken myself to be in some way the traitor Iago punished, in an unwritten sixth act. Chained in hell. But I was also Venice; the state left behind; the thing journeyed from.

When I was going on one day in the car about not having any close friends - using my favourite metaphor: the cage of glass between me and the rest of the world - she just laughed. 'You like it,' she said. 'You say you're isolated, boyo, but you really think you're different.

Men see objects, women see the relationship between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love 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 abusrd. 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.

Your first reaction is the characteristic one of your contrasuggestible century: to disbelieve, to disprove. I see this very clearly underneath your politeness.

An answer is always a form of death.

Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.

I knew that on that island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so few meetings that one too easily saw out of the present, and then the past seemed ten times closer than it was.

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. I did not pray for her, because prayer has no efficacy; I did not cry for her, because only extroverts cry twice; I sat in the silence of that night, that infinite hostility to man, to permanence, to love, remembering her, remembering her.

I had always believed, and not only out of cynicism, that a man and a woman could tell in the first ten minutes whether they wanted to go to bed together; and that the time that passed after those first ten minutes represented a tax, which might be worth paying if the article promised to be really enjoyable, but which nine times out of ten became rapidly excessive.

The battle was over. Our causalities 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.

Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the only 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 relationships between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love 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.

To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape. And my feelings, at the end of that wretched term, were those of a man who knows he's in a cage, exposed to the jeers of all his old ambitions until he dies.

Ideeea ca ne plac oamenii este o iluzie pe care trebuie s-o pastram in noi daca vrem sa traim in societate. Dar eu am expulzat-o de mult, cel putin cat traiesc aici. Tu vrei sa fii iubit? Eu ma multumesc pur si simplu sa "fiu", sa exist. Poate intr-o zi ai sa inteegi si tu ce inseamana asta. Si ai sa zambesti. Un zambet aprobator, un zambet sarcastic.

I saw that this cataclysm must be an expiation for some barbarous crime of civilization, some terrible human lie. What the lie was, I had too little knowledge of history or science to know then. I know now it was our believing that we were fulfilling some end, serving some plan - that all would come out well in the end, because there was some great plan over all. Instead of the reality. There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves.

She argued. She cried. She took my faltering, my tortured refusals for something far finer than they really were. At the end of the afternoon, before we left the wood, and with a solemnity and sincerity, a complete dedication of herself that I cannot describe to you because such unconditional promising is another extinct mystery...she said, Whatever happens I shall never marry anyone but you.

Staring out to sea, I finally forced myself to stop thinking of her as someone still somewhere, if only in memory, still obscurely alive, breathing, doing, moving, but as a shovelful of ashes already scattered; as a broken link, a biological dead end, an eternal withdrawal from reality, a once complex object that now dwindled, dwindled, left nothing behind except a l like a fallen speck of soot on a blank sheet of paper.

Knowledge of my atrocious selfishness, settled on me. All those bitter home truths she had flung at me, right from the beginning…and still loved me; was so blind that she still loved me. One day she had said: When you love me (and she had not meant “make love to me”) it’s as if God forgave me for being the mess I am; and I took it as chicanery, another emotional blackmail, to make me feel essential and so give me a sense of responsibility towards her.

If it makes you happier – I’m free.’ The rain came in sudden great swathes across the tree-tops and hit the windows and the roof; like spring rain, out of season. The bedroom air seemed full of unspoken words, unformulated guilts, a vicious silence, like the moments before a bridge collapses. We lay side by side, untouching, effigies on a bed turned tomb; sickeningly afraid to say what we really thought. In the end she spoke, in a voice that tried to be normal, but sounded harsh.

I suppose I'd had, by the standards of that pre-permissive time, a good deal of sex for my age. Girls, or a certain kind of girl, liked me; I had a car-not so common among undergraduates in those days-and I had some money. I wasn't ugly; and even more important, I had my loneliness, which, as every cad knows, is a deadly weapon with women. My 'technique' was to make a show of unpredictability, cynicism, and indifference. Then, like a conjurer with his white rabbit, I produced the solitary heart.

There were minutes of silence then and in them I thought about the only truth that mattered, the only morality that mattered, the only sin, the only crime. When Lily de Seitas had told me her version of it at the end of our meeting at the museum I had taken it as a retrospective thing, a comment on my past and on my anecdote about the butcher. But I saw now it had been about my future. History has superseded the ten commandments of the Bible; for me they had never had any real meaning, that is, any other than a conformitant influence. But sitting in that bedroom, staring at the glow of the fire on the jamb of the door through to the sitting room, I knew that at last I began to feel the force of this super-commandment, summary of them all; somewhere I knew I had to choose it, and every day afresh, even though I went on failing to keep it. Conchis had talked of points of fulcrum, moments when one met one's future. I also knew it was all bound up with Alison, with choosing Alison, and having to go on choosing her every day. Adulthood was like a mountain, and I stood at the foot of this cliff of ice, this impossible and unclimbable: Thou shalt not inflict unnecessary pain.

She died." I had to prompt him. "Soon after?" "In the early hours of February the nineteenth, 1916." I tried to see the expression on his face, but it was too dark. "There was a typhoid epidemic. She was working in a hospital." "Poor girl." "All past. All under the sea." "You make it seem present." "I do not wish to make you sad." "The scent of lilac." "Old man's sentiment. Forgive me." There was a silence between us. He was staring into the night. The bat flitted so low that I saw its silhouette for a brief moment against the Milky Way. "Is this why you never married?" "The dead live." The blackness of the trees. I listened for footsteps, but none came. A suspension. "How do they live?" And yet again he let the silence come, as if the silence would answer my questions better than he could himself; but just when I had decided he would not answer, he spoke. "By love.

These ideas can be made more concrete with a parable, which I borrow from John Fowles’s wonderful novel, The Magus. Conchis, the principle character in the novel, finds himself Mayor of his home town in Greece when the Nazi occupation begins. One day, three Communist partisans who recently killed some German soldiers are caught. The Nazi commandant gives Conchis, as Mayor, a choice — either Conchis will execute the three partisans himself to set an example of loyalty to the new regime, or the Nazis will execute every male in the town. Should Conchis act as a collaborator with the Nazis and take on himself the direct guilt of killing three men? Or should he refuse and, by default, be responsible for the killing of over 300 men? I often use this moral riddle to determine the degree to which people are hypnotized by Ideology. The totally hypnotized, of course, have an answer at once; they know beyond doubt what is correct, because they have memorized the Rule Book. It doesn’t matter whose Rule Book they rely on — Ayn Rand’s or Joan Baez’s or the Pope’s or Lenin’s or Elephant Doody Comix — the hypnosis is indicated by lack of pause for thought, feeling and evaluation. The response is immediate because it is because mechanical. Those who are not totally hypnotized—those who have some awareness of concrete events of sensory space-time, outside their heads— find the problem terrible and terrifying and admit they don’t know any 'correct' answer. I don’t know the 'correct' answer either, and I doubt that there is one. The universe may not contain 'right' and 'wrong' answers to everything just because Ideologists want to have 'right' and 'wrong' answers in all cases, anymore than it provides hot and cold running water before humans start tinkering with it. I feel sure that, for those awakened from hypnosis, every hour of every day presents choices that are just as puzzling (although fortunately not as monstrous) as this parable. That is why it appears a terrible burden to be aware of who you are, where you are, and what is going on around you, and why most people would prefer to retreat into Ideology, abstraction, myth and self-hypnosis. To come out of our heads, then, also means to come to our senses, literally—to live with awareness of the bottle of beer on the table and the bleeding body in the street. Without polemic intent, I think this involves waking from hypnosis in a very literal sense. Only one individual can do it at a time, and nobody else can do it for you. You have to do it all alone.