Alice Urchin > Alice's Quotes

“All the effort in the world won't matter if you're not inspired.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“What we don't understand we can make mean anything.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“Most times, it's just a lot easier not to let the world know what's wrong.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Anyone who believes what a cat tells him deserves all he gets.”
― Neil Gaiman, Stardust

“Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel.”
― Neil Gaiman, Stardust

“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.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“The human race is unimportant. It is the self that must not be betrayed."

"I suppose one could say that Hitler didn't betray his self."

"You are right. He did not. But millions of Germans did betray their selves. That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“It's despair at the lack of feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world. It's despair that perfectly normal young men can be made vicious and evil because they've won a lot of money. And then do what you've done to me.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“If you forget everything else about me, please remember this. I walked down that street and I never looked back and I love you. I love you. I love you so much that I shall hate you for ever for today.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. One day you will know what that means, perhaps. And you will smile. Not against me. But with me.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“Between skin and skin, there is only light.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.'
To live alone?'
To live. With what you are.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“I acquired expensive habits and affected manners. I got a third-class degree and a first-class illusion: that I was a poet. But nothing could have been less poetic that my seeing-through-all boredom with life in general and with making a living in particular. I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope-- an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all. But I did absorb a small dose of one permanently useful thing, Oxford's greatest gift to civilized life: Socratic honesty. It showed me, very intermittently, that it is not enough to revolt against one's past. One day I was outrageously bitter among some friends about the Army; back in my own rooms later it suddenly struck me that just because I said with impunity things that would have apoplexed my dead father, I was still no less under his influence. The truth was I was not a cynic by nature, only by revolt. I had got away from what I hated, but I hadn't found where I loved, and so I pretended that there was nowhere to love. Handsomely equipped to fail, I went out into the world.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“He is solid; immovable, iron-willed. He showed me one day his killing bottle. I'm imprisoned in it. Fluttering against the glass. Because I can see through it I still think I can escape. I have hope. But it's all an illusion.
A thick round wall of glass.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“The dead live."
"How do they live?"
"By love.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“It came to me…that I didn't want to be anywhere else in the world at that moment, that what I was feeling at that moment justified all I had been through, because all I had been through was my being there. I was experiencing…a new self-acceptance, a sense that I had to be this mind and this body, its vices and its virtues, and that I had no other chance or choice.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness, to death.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“It was too exactly as imagined to be true. But I felt as gladly and expectantly disorientated, as happily and alertly alone, as Alice in Wonderland.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“cras amet qui numquam amavit quique amavit cras amet.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“I read and I read; and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.”
― John Fowles, The Magus