“
I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
Forgetting’s not something you do, it happens to you. Only it didn’t happen to me.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren't ashamed of being dull and little.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
The ordinary man is the curse of civilization.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can't you understand? I don't think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a lot of nasty things are beautiful.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke.
We're so weak physically, so helpless with things. Still, even today. But we're stronger than they are. We can stand their cruelty. They can't stand ours.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
They're beautiful. But sad.'
Everything's sad if you make it so, I said.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
It's despair at the lack of feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world. It's despair that perfectly normal young men can be made vicious and evil because they've won a lot of money. And then do what you've done to me.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
You must make, always. You must act, if you believe something. Talking about acting is like boasting about pictures you're going to paint. The most terrible bad form.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
It is me. I am his madness. For years he's been looking for something to put his madness into. And he found me.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
Just those three words, said and meant. I love you.
They were quite hopeless. He said it as he might have said, I have cancer.
His fairy story.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
I am one in a row of specimens. It's when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I'm meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive. but it's the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
He is solid; immovable, iron-willed. He showed me one day his killing bottle. I'm imprisoned in it. Fluttering against the glass. Because I can see through it I still think I can escape. I have hope. But it's all an illusion.
A thick round wall of glass.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
I must fight with my weapons. Not his. Not selfishness and brutality and shame and resentment.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
He's not human; he's an empty space disguised as a human.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
I mean I never feel I feel what I ought to feel.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
What you love is your own love. It's not love, it's selfishness. It's not me you think of, but what you feel about me.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
If there is a God he's a great loathsome spider in the darkness.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
The sky is absolutely empty. Beautifully pure and empty.
As if the architects and builders would live in all the houses they built! Or could live in them all. It's obvious, it stares you in the fact. There must be a God and he can't know anything about us.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
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.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
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.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
But forgetting's not something you do, it happens to you.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
The only thing that really matters is feeling and living what you believe - so long as it's something more than belief in your own comfort.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
Stop thinking about class, she'd say. Like a rich man telling a poor man to stop thinking about money.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
You know what you do? You know how rain takes the colour out of everything? That's what you do to the English language. You blur it every time you open your mouth.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
They pay thousands and thousands for the Van Goghs and Modiglianis they'd have spat on at the time they were painted. Guffawed at. Made coarse jokes about.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
I have a strange illusion quite often. I think I've become deaf. I have to make a little noise to prove I'm not. I clear my throat to show myself that everything is normal. It's like the little Japanese girl they found in the ruins of Hiroshima. Everything dead; and she was singing to her doll.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
He is the same, but everything is different.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
Oh,clever... what's the use of that? Are they human beings?
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
Just because you can’t express your feelings it doesn’t mean they’re not deep.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
It's like the day you realize dolls are dolls. I pick up my old self and I see it's silly. A toy I've played with too often. It's a little sad, like an old golliwog at the bottom of the cupboard. Innocent and used-up and proud and silly.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
Some people would say- you're only a drop, your word-breaking is only a drop, it wouldn't matter. But all the evil in the world's made up of little drops. It's silly talking about the unimportance of the little drops. The little drops and the ocean are the same thing.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
Just those three words, said and meant.I love you.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
8. You hate the political buisness of nationality. You hate everything, in politics and art and everything else, that is not genuine and deep and necessary. You don't have time for silly trivial things. You live seriously. You don't go to silly films, even if you want to; you don't read cheap newspapers; you don't listen to trash on the wireless and the telly; you don't waste time talking about nothing. You use your life.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
How I hate ignorance! Caliban’s ignorance, my ignorance, the world’s ignorance! Oh, I could learn and learn and learn and learn. I could cry, I want to learn so much.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector: Play)
“
I love honesty and freedom and giving. I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
The two of us in that room. No past, no future. All intense deep that-time-only. A feeling that everything must end, the music, ourselves, the moon, everything. That if you get to the heart of things you find sadness for ever and ever, everywhere; but a beautiful silver sadness, like a Christ face.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
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.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world. It's despair that perfectly normal young men can be made vicious and evil because they've won a lot of money. And then do what you've done to me.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
It makes me sick,the blindness, deadness, out-of-dateness, stodginess and, yes, sheer jealous malice of the great bulk of England.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
He's a collector. That's the great dead thing in him.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
People won't admit it, they're too busy grabbing to see that the lights have fused. They can't see the darkness and the spider-face beyond and the great web of it all. That there's always this if you scratch at the surface of happiness and goodness.
The black and the black and the black.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
It's no good. I've been trying to sleep for the last half-hour, and I can't. Writing here is a sort of drug. It's the only thing I look forward to. This afternoon I read what I wrote... And it seemed vivid. I know it seems vivid because my imagination fills in all the bits another person wouldn't understand. I mean, it's vanity. But it seems a sort of magic... And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
Love is something that comes in different clothes, with a different way and different face, and perhaps it takes a long time for you to accept it, to be able to call it love.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
I'm not really sorry. But I'm not absolutely unsorry.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
But forgetting's not something you do, it happens to you. Only it didn't happen to me
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
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.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
He said, I suppose there are people who are purely moved by great art. I never met a painter who was. I'm not. All I think of when I see that picture is that it has the supreme mastery I have spent all my life trying to attain. And shall not. Ever.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
I hate people who collect things and classify things and give them names and then forget all about them. That’s what people are always doing in art. They call a painter an impressionist or a cubist or something and then they put him in a drawer and don’t see him as a living individual painter any more.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
He said, one has to learn that painting well - in the academic and technical sense - comes right at the bottom of the list. I mean, you've got that ability. So have thousands.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
As if I'd lit a fire in the darkness to try and warm us. And all I'd done was to see his real face by it.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
Everything free and decent in life is being locked away in filthy little cellars by beastly people who don't care.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
I am Emma Woodhouse. I feel for her, of her and in her. I have a different sort of snobbism, but I understand her snobbism. Her priggishness. I admire it. I know she does wrong things, she tries to organize other people's lives, she can't see Mr Knightley is a man in a million. She's temporarily silly, yet all the time one knows she's basically intelligent. Creative, determined to set the highest standards. A real human being.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
I know I can't do things like love by halves, I know I have love pent up in me, I shall throw myself away, lose my heart and my body and my mind and soul to some cad like G.P. Who'll betray me. I feel it.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
Sıradan insan uygarlığın lanetidir.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
Not that I will paint in my own way, live in my own way, speak in my own way—they don’t mind that. It even excites them. But what they can’t stand is that I hate them when they don’t behave in their own way.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
Я - его безумие. Годы напролет он искал, во что бы воплотить свое безумие. И нашел меня.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
Talking about acting is like boasting about pictures you're going to paint. The most terrible bad form.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
The truth was she couldn’t do ugly things. She was too beautiful.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
Urasc oamenii de stiinta care colectioneaza lucruri si le clasifica si le dau nume,ca apoi sa uite cu totul de ele.La fel se intampla si in arta.Eticheteaza un pictor drept impresionist sau cubist sau altceva si il pun intr-un anume sertar si nu se mai gandesc la ca la o fiinta umana care picteaza
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
I mean most women just want to be good at something, they’ve got good-at minds, and they mean deftness and a flair and good taste and what-not. They can’t ever understand that if your desire is to go to the furthest limits of yourself then the actual form your art takes doesn’t seem important to you. Whether you use words or paint or sounds.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
If you feel something deeply, you’re not ashamed to show your feeling.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
I'm so far from everything. From normality. From light. From everything I want to be.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
I hate beyond hate.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
This pain, this terrible seeing-through that is in me now. It wasn't necessary. It is all pain, and it buys nothing. Gives birth to nothing.
All in vain. All wasted.
The older the world becomes, the more obvious it is. The bomb and the tortures in Algeria and the starving babies in the Congo. It gets bigger and darker.
More and more suffering for more and more. And more and more in vain.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
Look, Miranda, he said, those twenty long years that lie between you and me. I've more knowledge of life than you, I've lived more and betrayed more and seen more betrayed. At your age one is bursting with ideals. You think that because I can sometimes see what's trivial and what's important in art that I ought to be more virtuous. But I don't want to be virtuous. My charm (if there is any) for you is simply frankness. And experience. Not goodness. I'm not a good man. Perhaps morally I'm younger even than you are. Can you understand that?
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
It's despair at the lack of (I'm cheating, I didn't say all these things - but I'm going to write what I want to say as well as what I did) feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
Но он настолько ординарен, что это делает его неординарным.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
He said, men are vile.
I said, the vilest thing about them is that they can say that with a smile on their faces.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
I could scream abuse at him all day long; he wouldn't mind at all. It's me he wants, my look, my outside; not my emotions or my mind or my soul or even my body. Not anything human.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
Why should people have money if they don't know how to use it?
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
You accept that you are English. You don't pretend that you'd rather be French or Italian or something else.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
One writes things and the implications shriek- it's like suddenly realizing one's deaf.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
what you do blurs over what you did before.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
You despise the real bourgeois classes for all their snobbishness and their snobbish voices and ways. You do, don't you? Yet all you put in their place is a horrid little refusal to have nasty thoughts or do nasty things or be nasty in any way. Do you know that every great thing in the story of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
It's like football. Two sides may each want to beat the other, they may even hate each other as sides, but if someone came and told them football is stupid and not worth playing or caring about, then they'd feel together. It's feeling that matters.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
I'm Emma with her silly little clever-clever theories of love and marriage, and love is something that comes in different clothes, with a different way and different face, and perhaps it takes a long time for you to accept it, to be able to call it love.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
El sexo nada importa. El amor, sí
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
He uses my heart. Then turns and tramples on it.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
It's like living in the Arabian Nights. Being the favourite in the harem. But the one perfume you really want is freedom.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
Sex is just an activity, like anything else. It's not dirty, it's just two people playing with each other's bodies. Like dancing. Like a game.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
There were just all those evenings we sat together and it doesn't seem possible that it will never be again. It was like we were the only two people in the world. No one will ever understand how happy we were...I could sit there all night watching her, just the shape of her head and the way the hair fell from it with a special curve, so graceful it was, like the shape of a swallow-tail. It was like a veil or a cloud, it would lie like silk strands all untidy and loose but lovely over her shoulders, I wish I had words to describe it like a poet would or an artist. She had a way of throwing it back when it had fallen too much forward, it was just a simple natural movement. Sometimes I wanted to say to her, please do it again, please let your hair fall forward and toss it back. Only of course it would have been stupid. Everything she did was delicate like that. Just turning a page. Standing up or sitting down, drinking, smoking, anything. Even when she did things considered ugly, like yawning or stretching, she made it seem pretty. The truth was she couldn't do ugly things. She was too beautiful.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
The feeling that he would probably betray me. And I’ve always thought of marriage as a sort of young adventure, two people of the same age setting out together, discovering together, growing together. But I would have nothing to tell him, nothing to show him. All the helping would be on his side.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
Как-то он показал мне сосуд. Называется морилка. Усыплять
бабочек. Вот я и сижу в такой морилке. Бьюсь крыльями о стекло. Оттого, что
оно прозрачно, мне кажется, что побег возможен. Что есть надежда. Только это
всего лишь иллюзия.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
I've been sitting here and thinking about God. I don't think I believe in God any more. It is not only me, I think of all the millions who must have lived like this in the war. The Anne Franks. And back through history. What I feel I know now is that God doesn't intervene. He lets us suffer. If you pray for liberty then you may get relief just because you pray, or because things happen anyhow which bring you liberty. But God can't hear. There's nothing human like hearing or seeing or pitying or helping about him. I mean perhaps God has created the world and the fundamental laws of matter and evolution. But he can't care about the individuals. He's planned it so some individuals are happy, some sad, some lucky, some not. Who is sad, who is not, he doesn't know, and he doesn't care. So he doesn't exist, really.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
I want to paint like Berthe Morisot, I don’t mean with her colours or forms or anything physical, but with her simplicity and light. I don’t want to be clever or great or “significant” or given all that clumsy masculine analysis. I want to paint sunlight on children’s faces, or flowers in a hedge or a street after April rain. The essences. Not the things themselves. Swimmings of light on the smallest things. Or am I being sentimental? Depressed. I’m so far from everything. From normality. From light. From what I want to be.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
The honest poor are the moneyless vulgar rich. Poverty forces them to have good qualities and pride in other things besides money. Then when they have money they don’t know what to do with it. They forget all the old virtues, which weren’t real virtues anyway. They think the only virtue is to make more money and to spend. They can’t imagine that there are people to whom money is nothing. That the most beautiful things are quite independent of money.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)
“
I am one in a row of specimens. It's when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I'm meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive, but it's the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead. I felt it terribly strongly today. That my being alive and changing and having a separate mind and having moods and all that was becoming a nuisance. He is solid; immovabile, iron-willed. He showed me one day what he called his killing-bottle. I'm imprisoned in it. Fluttering against the glass. Because I can see through it I still think I can escape. I have hope. But it's all an illusion. A thick round wall of glass.
”
”
John Fowles (The Collector)