John Fowles - Man Quotes

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Years later I saw the gabbia at Piacenza; a harsh black canary-cage strung up high the side of the the towering campanile, in which prisoners were once left to starve to death and rot in full view of the town below. And looking up at it, I remembered that winter in Greece, that Gabbia I had constructed for myself out of light, solitude and self-delusions. My feelings at the end of that wretched term, were those of a man who knows he is in a cage, exposed to the jeers of all his old ambitions until he dies.

John Fowles
It. Is. Not. Ended. There was just the trace of a humourless smile on his face; and more than a trace of menace. As if he meant something more than that there was a sequel to this scene; but that the whole Nazi weltanschaaung to be, resurrected and realised. He was an impressively iron man...

John Fowles
She had a kind of genius for picking the wrong man. She always looked for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole romantic kitchen, whereas I lived by a simpler diet, prose and pudding. I don't expect attractive men to have attractive souls.

John Fowles
I am talking about the general psychological health of the species, man. He needs the existence of mysteries, not their solution.

John Fowles
The writing was impeccably neat and legible though rather crabbed into the centre of the page; I saw a neat crabbed man behind it. Presumably some sort of retreat, one of those desiccated young Catholics that used to mince around Oxford when I was an undergraduate.

John Fowles
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.

John Fowles
The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.

John Fowles
Perhaps the clue lay in indispensibility. I was being taught some obscure metaphysical lesson about the place of man in existence, about the limitations of the egocentric view...

John Fowles
Man is about to be deprived of a great pole - work routine. The nightmare of capitalist society is unemployment; the nightmare of cybernetic society will be employment.

John Fowles
I think it is interesting that we have come back to star- and space ships. Jet will do for a transport shorthand; yet when man really reaches, across the vast seas of space, he still reaches in ships.

John Fowles