The Collector

by John Fowles

But forgetting’s not something you do, it happens to you. Only it didn’t happen to me.

That was the day I first gave myself the dream that came true. It began where she was being attacked by a man and I ran up and rescued her. Then somehow I was the man that attacked her, only I didn’t hurt her; I captured her and drove her off in the van to a remote house and there I kept her captive in a nice way. Gradually she came to know me and like me and the dream grew into the one about our living in a nice modern house, married, with kids and everything.

What you do blurs over what you did before.

Stop thinking about class, she’d say. Like a rich man telling a poor man to stop thinking about money.

She was just like a woman. Unpredictable. Smiling one minute and spiteful the next.

Just because you can’t express your feelings it doesn’t mean they’re not deep.

All I’m asking, I said, is that you understand how much I love you, how much I need you, how deep it is.

“We all want things we can’t have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.”

Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?”

Why do you take all the life out of life? Why do you kill all the beauty?”

forced promises are no promises,

Belonging’s two things. One who gives and one who accepts what’s given.

The ordinary man is the curse of civilization. But he’s so ordinary that he’s extraordinary.

I love honesty and freedom and giving. 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.

I’m desperately curious to know what life will bring to me. What will happen to me, how I’ll develop, what I’ll be in five years’ time, in ten, in thirty.