John Fowles

-- "These fragments I have shoved against my ruins." - T. S. Eliot

-- The complex space-time I live in is... that of my imagination.

-- "The 'curious spiral rhythm' of a mind returning again and again to its main points of concern, always moving on, and yet blurring or destroying the idea of time as sequence, so that the fragments, the tesserae combine to form a kaleidoscopic pattern; a shake, or a reordering, and a new image takes shape." - Jan Relf

-- The frightening capacity of the image and the word to trigger buried things, and to drown sober reason.

-- "There is a mania to call for the lost thing until it returns." - Günter Grass

-- The 'princesse lointaine', the archetypally unattainable woman.

-- 'Nympholepsy' - the perverse but persistent condition of desire for the unattainable which is so paradoxically productive.

-- I am surrounded by people who have not chosen themselves in this sense, but who have let themselves be chosen- by money, by status symbols, by jobs- and I don't know which are sadder, those who know this, or those who don't.

-- Their chatter deafens me, and I feel like Alice at the tea party. They are not even good 'material'.

-- I am an 'ochlophobe'; for me, three is always a potential mob.

-- The only sort of relationship that ever had any interest for me is the I-thou one.

-- The law may be very fine, but there is no justice.

-- Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.

-- First, to be an atheist.
   Second, not to belong to any political party.
   Third- not to belong to any bloc, group, organization, or school.

-- I dislike all the places where the imagination is helpless and mere documentation takes over.

-- Hypnopoeic 'stills' (they seem almost always static) float into my mind very often.

-- Follow the accident- fear the fixed plan.

-- Socratic skepticism- at best it is a sincere belief in the virtues of doubt....

-- Zulu wish- 'Go well.'

-- "Go well, and forgive me."

-- Pleonasm (?) - redundancy- the use of more words than necessary to denote mere sense, as in 'the man he said'- {an affectation used by Dylan, and Guthrie, both as folk/rural identifier and as rhythmic tool.}

-- Life is too short and too unjust, for that battered other cheek to bear alone.

-- How to judge, without inviting judgment in return? The problem is insoluble, of course, but its specific insolubility is perhaps the most characteristic tension at the heart of our best art.

-- [It is wonderful to be driven by a] critical opposition that is not content not to act.

-- Time is the great violater now, not man; and virginity is a cosmetic, and extra titillation, rather than a source of mystery.

-- It is not man who is imposing this [houri/starlet] role; woman herself is accepting it.

-- For I need nothing to remind me of death; but always something to remind me of death's cunning.

-- The next time you see a pretty girl, look at her; and then, I beg you, look beyond her.

-- All bidders for power seem trapped in their need of the ancient tribal psyche and its easily conditioned responses.

-- We lack a word for what García Márquez so subtly describes: all that nexus of instincts and feelings that we inherit quite as much from our prehistoric past as from our historical one, the antique lumber room of the species mind, choked with totems and fetishes, ignorance and fears, selfishness and unreason. In a world already overfilled with dissatisfied human beings, this "ancient psyche" is as menacing as the nuclear missile (which can be seen as a mere product of it, a logical extension of the first weapon Cain picked up to kill his brother). Its public effect is always regressive -- a return to past barbarism, to the animal in man, to the child in the adult, whether it be the bully-boyism of the Iron Lady or the flagrant fibbing of the junta when caught with jam (or rather, young men's blood) on its greedy fingers.
    I am not saying that the ancient psyche is all maleficent. It plays a considerable part in the creation and appreciation of the arts, in our enjoyment of many private pleasures of life and countless other innocent things. It is a vital constituent in our sense of the richness, the depth, the echoingness, like a Bach fugue, of human history; so vital indeed that I suspect this is the major reason we have such difficulty separating its good (and mainly aesthetic) effects from its morally bad ones. These latter lie for me on the tribal side of the ancient psyche, in all those socially institutionalized elements derived from the primitive survival needs of early man. When this side dominates public feeling or, even worse, is deliberately invoked by government in order to dictate public response, Armageddon moves visibly closer.

-- The way to kill off characters (or to keep them dead) is to show them in some banal repeat of a previous situation, not to put them in a highly romantic setting and face-to-fang with one of the great archetypal monsters of folklore.

-- Even the most intimate conversation is a quasi-public thing; so few of us thinks as frankly and profoundly in our mouths as we do in our minds.

-- The artist who does not keep a profound part of himself not just open to the past, but of his past, is like an electrical system without a current.

-- Gaining briefly to lose eternally is the chief fuel of the imagination in Hardy himself.

-- The girl is put, with a ghastly irony, to "dust all my Venus failures."

-- One cannot exorcise witches; least of all the ultimate witch, by symbolically marrying them.

-- Creating an embodiment of the Well-Beloved is like marrying her - and she would never stand for that.

-- The universal condition of humankind is a permanent state of loss.

-- Molière- "Most comic situations come from a failure of reciprocal understanding and from using the same word to express contrary things."

-- Elvira...is really a young woman who tries to hide from her own sensuality behind a screen of idealism and its conventional rhetoric. She cannot break through to her more natural self until she is truly angry or moved- and this is precisely when Dom Juan is most vulnerable to her.

-- "He hasn't understood a word she's said." In my opinion- this is [Sganarelle's] one aside that is said not for comic effect, but out of genuine sadness- perhaps even a despair.

-- John Aubrey [concerning the non-scientificality of the pious]- "It is certainly a profound part of religion to glorify God in his works, but to take no notice at all of what is daily offered before our eyes is gross stupidity."

-- What Fournier pinned down is the one truly acute perception of the young which is the awareness of loss as a function of passing time.

-- The satisfaction of the desire is also the death of the desire.

-- Domaine perdu

-- Some objects and ideas do have value, though others may be as futile as a film star's fart, and all too often, just as noisome.

-- Lawrence- intuition turned dogma.

-- [Only through atheism can one obtain] the ability to feel, and venerate the existingness in things.

-- Nature is a sort of art sans art; and the right human attitude to it ought to be unashamedly poetic rather than scientific.

-- I think the first thing to gain, in the appreciation of nature, as well as of art, is confidence in one's ability to see beauty for oneself.

-- I never really understood why I loved my [...] wife, yet I did, and long ago realized that the not-knowing (the emotion's prevailing over common sense and reason) can become a mysterious part of love.
     {I would say a requirement of it....}

-- Generally we know we must, like grubs in their cells, inhabit the cramping structures our biology and psychology- and that odd computer we call the brain- have evolved for us.

-- Both art and science are in eternal chaos. We need to institute an oscillation between the two sides, like a heartbeat; to understand not just the nature of things, but the nature of understanding them.

-- Man is wedged between being a social creature and being an individual. I think the nemo, the sense that you are nothing or nobody, can drive us all to violence or unreason. Through all human history it had been the hidden motive- that unbearable desire to prove oneself somebody- behind countless insanities and acts of violence.

-- The [way] I hope for is the Socratic: partly skeptical, often cynical, but always looking for an ethical truth.

-- Above all, you are in search of yourself. The trouble is that so often you lose track, through vanity.

-- "Power" seems always Fascistic; potentially. It always kills true thought and feeling.

-- The knowledge that you haven't explored, can't explore, every path is part of the sense of loss- all that you've missed seeing.

-- I have sympathy with Lou Salomé's view after her relationship with Rilke, that male artists, while better than mere men, are at best no more than imperfect women.

-- Still... still. I exist still as I write this, you exist still as you read it. Can't you sense a mystery, a precious secret told to you alone, in that word?