The Magus

by John Fowles

particular. I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope

I said with impunity things that would have apoplexed my dead father, I was still no less under his influence. The truth was I was not a cynic by nature; only by revolt.

This is true of all collecting. It extinguishes the moral instinct. The object

He went to Mass. But only, I think, because the observance of ritual is a form of the cultivation of beauty.

Gradually, those last two days, I had begun to absorb the fact of Alison’s death; that is, had begun to edge it out of the moral world into the aesthetic, where it was easier to live with.