"The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.
More John Fowles quotes
"Once upon a time there was a young prince who believed in all things but three. He did not believe in princesses, he did not believe in islands, he di...
"Everything free and decent in life is being locked away in filthy little cellars by beastly people who don't care.
"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 a...
"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 plac...
"The river of life, of mysterious laws and mysterious choice, flows past a deserted embankment; and along that other deserted embankment Charles now be...
"Because they died, we know we still live. Because a star explodes and a thousand worlds like ours die, we know this world is. That is the smile: that ...
"Death starves us of life. So we learn to fabricate our own immortalities.
"Staring out to sea, I finally forced myself to stop thinking of her as someone still somewhere, if only in memory, still obscurely alive, breathing, d...
"It was an unforgettable painting; it set a dense golden halo of light round the most trivial of moments, so that the moment, and all such moments, cou...
"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.
"Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was incongenerous, its guilt irreducible, its sadness immortal; a bracelet o...
"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 wit...
"So that the smile was not so much an attitude to be taken to life as the nature of the cruelty of life, a cruelty we cannot even choose to avoid, sinc...
"An answer is always a form of death.