The Collector

by John Fowles

could scream abuse at him all day long; he wouldn’t mind at all. It’s me he wants, my look, my outside; not my emotions or my mind or my soul or even my body. Not anything human. He’s a collector. That’s the great dead thing in him.

She said, what I mean is he’s so terribly good-looking, one could forget he’s so stupid. You might think, I could marry him and teach him. Couldn’t you? And you know you couldn’t. Or you could go to bed with him just for fun and one day you’d suddenly find you were in love with his body and you couldn’t live without it and you’d be stuck with his rotten mind for ever and ever. Then she said, doesn’t it terrify you? Not more than so many other things. I’m serious.

I won’t write any more. I’m reading Sense and Sensibility and I must find out what happens to Marianne. Marianne is me; Eleanor is me as I ought to be.

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.

Poverty forces them to have good qualities and pride in other things besides money. Then when they have money they don’t know what to do with it. They forget all the old virtues, which weren’t real virtues anyway. They think the only virtue is to make more money and to spend. They can’t imagine that there are people to whom money is nothing. That the most beautiful things are quite independent of money.

knew we shouldn’t be able to meet again. I could never cure him. Because I’m his disease.