The Collector Quotes

“I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“It's despair at the lack of feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world. It's despair that perfectly normal young men can be made vicious and evil because they've won a lot of money. And then do what you've done to me.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“Forgetting’s not something you do, it happens to you. Only it didn’t happen to me.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren't ashamed of being dull and little.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“He is solid; immovable, iron-willed. He showed me one day his killing bottle. I'm imprisoned in it. Fluttering against the glass. Because I can see through it I still think I can escape. I have hope. But it's all an illusion.
A thick round wall of glass.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke.
We're so weak physically, so helpless with things. Still, even today. But we're stronger than they are. We can stand their cruelty. They can't stand ours.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“You must make, always. You must act, if you believe something. Talking about acting is like boasting about pictures you're going to paint. The most terrible bad form.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“The ordinary man is the curse of civilization.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“I am one in a row of specimens. It's when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I'm meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive. but it's the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“They're beautiful. But sad.'
Everything's sad if you make it so, I said.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can't you understand? I don't think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a lot of nasty things are beautiful.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you. ”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“The sky is absolutely empty. Beautifully pure and empty.

As if the architects and builders would live in all the houses they built! Or could live in them all. It's obvious, it stares you in the fact. There must be a God and he can't know anything about us.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“I mean I never feel I feel what I ought to feel.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“It's no good. I've been trying to sleep for the last half-hour, and I can't. Writing here is a sort of drug. It's the only thing I look forward to. This afternoon I read what I wrote... And it seemed vivid. I know it seems vivid because my imagination fills in all the bits another person wouldn't understand. I mean, it's vanity. But it seems a sort of magic... And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“8. You hate the political buisness of nationality. You hate everything, in politics and art and everything else, that is not genuine and deep and necessary. You don't have time for silly trivial things. You live seriously. You don't go to silly films, even if you want to; you don't read cheap newspapers; you don't listen to trash on the wireless and the telly; you don't waste time talking about nothing. You use your life.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“I have a strange illusion quite often. I think I've become deaf. I have to make a little noise to prove I'm not. I clear my throat to show myself that everything is normal. It's like the little Japanese girl they found in the ruins of Hiroshima. Everything dead; and she was singing to her doll.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“Just those three words, said and meant. I love you.

They were quite hopeless. He said it as he might have said, I have cancer.

His fairy story.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“It’s rather like your voice. You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven’t any choice. But it’s what you say that counts. It’s what distinguishes all great art from the other kind.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“Я - его безумие. Годы напролет он искал, во что бы воплотить свое безумие. И нашел меня. ”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“It's like the day you realize dolls are dolls. I pick up my old self and I see it's silly. A toy I've played with too often. It's a little sad, like an old golliwog at the bottom of the cupboard. Innocent and used-up and proud and silly.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“Oh,clever... what's the use of that? Are they human beings?”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“People who teach you cram old ideas, old views, old ways, into you. Like covering plants with layer after layer of old earth; it's no wonder the poor things so rarely come up fresh and green.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“I am Emma Woodhouse. I feel for her, of her and in her. I have a different sort of snobbism, but I understand her snobbism. Her priggishness. I admire it. I know she does wrong things, she tries to organize other people's lives, she can't see Mr Knightley is a man in a million. She's temporarily silly, yet all the time one knows she's basically intelligent. Creative, determined to set the highest standards. A real human being.”
― John Fowles, The Collector