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The Magus QUOTES

The Magus QUOTES

1 " 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. "

― John Fowles , The Magus

2 " 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. "

― John Fowles , The Magus

3 " 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. "

― John Fowles , The Magus

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

― John Fowles , The Magus

5 " 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. "

― John Fowles , The Magus

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

― John Fowles , The Magus

7 " 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. "

― John Fowles , The Magus

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

― John Fowles , The Magus

9 " 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. "

― John Fowles , The Magus

10 " 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. "

― John Fowles , The Magus

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

― John Fowles , The Magus

12 " 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. "

― John Fowles , The Magus

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

― John Fowles , The Magus

14 " In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love. "

― John Fowles , The Magus

15 " Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish if we are to live in society. It is one I have long ago banished from my life. You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. "

― John Fowles , The Magus

16 " 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. "

― John Fowles , The Magus

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

― John Fowles , The Magus

18 " But he was absolutely alone. No one ever wrote to him. Visited him. Totally alone. And I believe the happiest man I have ever met. "

― John Fowles , The Magus

19 " 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. "

― John Fowles , The Magus

20 " A mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless... speciesless. "

― John Fowles , The Magus