John Fowles - Reality Quotes

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I do not defend Conchis' decision at the execution, but I defend the reality of the dilemma. God and freedom are totally anti-pathetic concepts; and men believe in their imaginary gods most often because they are afraid to believe in the other thing. I am old enough to realise now that they do sometimes with good reason. True freedom lies between each two, never in one alone, and therefore is never absolute freedom.

John Fowles
We were equally tired, in mid-century, of cold sanity and hot blasphemy; of the over-cerebral and of the over-faecal; the way out lay somewhere else. Words had lost their power, either for good or for evil; still hung, like a mist, over the reality of action, distorting, misleading, castrating; but at least since Hitler and Hiroshima they were seen to be a mist, a flimsy superstructure.

John Fowles
You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it... fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf – your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo sapiens.

John Fowles
I saw that this cataclysm must be an expiation for some barbarous crime of civilisation, some terrible human lie. What the lie was, I had too little knowledge of history to know then. I now know 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.

John Fowles
Whatever sympathy I feel towards religions, whatever admiration for some of their adherents, whatever historical or biological necessity I see in them, whatever metaphorical truth, I cannot accept them as credible explanations of reality; and they are incredible to me in proportion to the degree that they require my belief in positive human attributes and intervenient powers in their divinities.

John Fowles