John Fowles, The Magus
"...there are times when silence is a poem."
54 Quotes
"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, doing, moving, but as a shovelful of ashes already scattered; as a broken link, a biological dead end, an eternal withdrawal from reality, a once complex object that now dwindled, dwindled, left nothing behind except a l like a fallen speck of soot on a blank sheet of paper."
John Fowles, The Magus
"You're not me. You can't feel like I feel."I can feel."No you can't. You just choose not to feel or something and everything's fine."It's not fine. It's just not so bad."
John Fowles, The Magus
"Her stare fixed me. Without rancour and without regret; without triumph and without evil; as Desdemona once looked back on Venice. On the incomprehension, the baffled rage of Venice. I had taken myself to be in some way the traitor Iago punished, in an unwritten sixth act. Chained in hell. But I was also Venice; the state left behind; the thing journeyed from."
John Fowles, The Magus
"Think what it would be like if you got back to your island and there was no old man, no girl any more. No mysterious fun and games. The whole place locked up forever."
John Fowles, The Magus
"I was worse off than even Alison was; she hated life, I hated mysef. I had created nothing, I belonged to nothingness, to the néant, and it seemed to me that my own death was the only thing left that I could create."
John Fowles, The Magus
"He had the charm of all people who believe implicitly in themselves, that of integration."
John Fowles, The Magus
"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
"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
"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
"Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth."
John Fowles, The Magus
"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
"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
"I want to tell you what's really happened."Not now. Please not now. Whatever's happened, come and make love to me."And we did make love; not sex, but love; though sex would have been so much wiser."
John Fowles, The Magus
"Girls possess sexual tact in inverse proportion to their standard of education."
John Fowles, The Magus
"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
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