The Collector

by John Fowles

I said, if you asked me to stop collecting butterflies, I’d do it. I’d do anything you asked me. “Except let me fly away.”

When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies.”

Like falling off the edge of the world. There suddenly being an edge.

Every night I do something I haven’t done for years. I lie and pray. I don’t kneel, I know God despises kneelers.

He doesn’t believe in God. That makes me want to believe.

It’s his line. The mock-humble. Ever-so-sorry.

He’s very clever at looking hurt.

The only thing that really matters is feeling and living what you believe—so long as it’s something more than belief in your own comfort.

it’s rather like your voice. You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven’t any choice. But it’s what you say that counts.

Two people in a desert, trying to find both themselves and an oasis where they can live together.

Just a golden body throwing stones aimlessly into the sea.

I am one in a row of specimens. It’s when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I’m meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive, but it’s the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead.

I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and the mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren’t ashamed of being dull and little.

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.

But this is what I feel these days. That I belong to a sort of band of people who have to stand against all the rest. I don’t know who they are—famous men, dead and living, who’ve fought for the right things and created and painted in the right way, and unfamous people I know who don’t lie about things, who try not to be lazy, who try to be human and intelligent.

the honest poor are the moneyless vulgar rich. 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.

He doesn’t realize it fully yet, because he’s trying to be nice to me at the moment. But he’s much nearer than he was. One day soon he’s going to wake up and say to himself—I hate her.

He’s not human; he’s an empty space disguised as a human.

So much of you is given to ordinary people, suppressed, in ordinary life.

They sulk if you don’t give, and hate you when you do. Intelligent men must despise themselves for being like that. Their illogicality. Sour men and wounded women.

I could never cure him. Because I’m his disease.

If fifty people came to me, real honest respectable people, and swore blind you wouldn’t escape, I wouldn’t trust them. I wouldn’t trust the whole world.