The Collector

by John Fowles

“I hate scientists,” she said. “I hate people who collect things, and classify things and give them names and then forget all about them.

They call a painter an impressionist or a cubist or something and then they put him in a drawer and don’t see him as a living individual painter any more.

You know how rain takes the colour out of everything? That’s what you do to the English language. You blur it every time you open your mouth.”

“What I fear in you is something you don’t know is in you.”

I don’t see the point of wasting money on something you don’t believe in. I know rich people give sums, but in my opinion they do it to get their names published or to dodge the tax-man.

You despise the real bourgeois classes for all their snobbishness and their snobbish voices and ways. You do, don’t you? Yet all you put in their place is a horrid little refusal to have nasty thoughts or do nasty things or be nasty in any way. 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?”

I’d never collect anything but butterflies. Pictures don’t mean anything to me. I wouldn’t be doing it because I wanted, so there wouldn’t be any point. She could never see that.

“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.”

“Because I can’t marry a man to whom I don’t feel I belong in all ways. My mind must be his, my heart must be his, my body must be his. Just as I must feel he belongs to me.”