The Magus

by John Fowles

‘Aegean Blues’. One has to be a very complete artist to create good work among the purest and most balanced landscapes on this planet,

In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love.

wrote a letter in reply to say that I had been expecting her letter, that she was perfectly free. But I tore it up. If anything might hurt her, silence would; and I wanted to hurt her.

The school became a convenient scapegoat—how could one compose flawless verse if one was surrounded by futile routine?

So I posted the letter rather as one throws a message in a bottle into the sea; not quite as a joke, perhaps, but almost.

‘It is not possible to know Germany. Only to endure it.’

‘You do this… travelling by, I don’t know, something like telepathy?’

to other worlds than these

Fiction is the worst form of connection.’

a woman in a long saffron chiton. It had a blood-red hem where it ended at the knees.

sounds like Rose Madder

‘Are you asking me to commit osculation?’

I flung a look over my shoulder.

flung not flinged!

‘Guai a chi la tocca.’

It was like walking through a door, going all round the world, and then walking through the same door but a different door.

‘Then we heard Henrik say one word. Much more quietly. It was “Takk.” The Norwegian for “thanks”.

had an idea it might be a man with blue eyes and an axe.

‘We are all actors here, my friend. None of us is what we really are. We all lie some of the time, and some of us all the time.’

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

You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be.

better one poem than ten thousand sermons.

was the Ka sign, used by initiates ‘to gain possession of the cosmic forces of mystery’.

The word is rare, but exact.

But the maze has no centre.

cras amet qui numquam amavit quique amavit cras amet