John Fowles, The Magus

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"He stared to sea. "I gave up all ideas of practicing medicine. In spite of what I have just said about the wave and the water, in those years in France I am afraid I lived a selfish life. That is, I offered myself every pleasure. I traveled a great deal. I lost some money dabbling in the theatre, but I made much more dabbling on the Bourse. I gained a great many amusing friends, some of whom are now quite famous. But I was never very happy. I suppose I was fortunate. It took me only five years to discover what some rich people never discover — that we all have a certain capacity for happiness and unhappiness. And that the economic hazards of life do not seriously affect it."

"I don't believe in God. And I certainly don't feel chosen."I think you may be."I smiled dubiously. "Thank you."It is not meant as a compliment. Hazard makes you elect. You cannot elect yourself."

"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."