The Tree Quotes

“The evolution of human mentality has put us all in vitro now, behind the glass wall of our own ingenuity.”
― John Fowles, The Tree

“We shall never fully understand nature (or ourselves), and certainly never respect it, until we dissociate the wild from the notion of usability - however innocent and harmless the use. For it is the general uselessness of so much of nature that lies at the root of our ancient hostility and indifference to it.”
― John Fowles, The Tree

“No religion is the only religion, no church the true church.”
― John Fowles, The Tree

“Perhaps nowhere is our human mania for possessing, our delusion that the owned cannot have a soul of its own, more harmful to us. This disanimation justified all the horrors of the African slave trade. If the black man is so stupid that he can be enslaved, he cannot have the soul of a white man, he must be a mere animal.”
― John Fowles, The Tree

“Even the simplest knowledge of the names and habits of flowers or trees starts this distinguishing or individuating process, and removes us a step from total reality towards anthropocentrism.”
― John Fowles, The Tree

“Despite all the identifying, measuring, photographing, I had managed to set the experience in a kind of present past, a having looked, even as I was temporally and physically still looking...It is not necessarily too little knowledge that causes ignorance; possessing too much, or wanting to gain too much, can produce the same result.”
― John Fowles, The Tree

“We lack trust in the present, this moment, this actual seeing, because our culture tells us to trust only the reported back, the publicly framed, the edited, the thing set in the clearly artistic or the clearly scientific angle of perspective.”
― John Fowles, The Tree

“Man is a highly acquisitive creature, brainwashed by most modern societies into believing that the act of acquisition is more enjoyable than the fact of having acquired, that getting beats having got.”
― John Fowles, The Tree

“Ordinary experience, from waking second to second, is in fact highly synthetic (in the sense of combinative or constructive), and made of a complexity of strands, past memories and present perceptions, times and places, private and public history, hopelessly beyond science's powers to analyse. It is quintessentially 'wild' ... unphilosophical, irrational uncontrollable, incalculable.”
― John Fowles, The Tree

“partly out of his own inadequacies, partly because there are tenses human language has yet to invent.”
― John Fowles, The Tree

“Increasingly we live (and not only in terms of nature and novels) by the old tag, Aut Caesar, aut nullus. If I can’t be Caesar, I’ll be no one.”
― John Fowles, The Tree

“An additional element of alienation has come with the cinema and television, which are selective in another way. They present natural reality not only through other eyes, but a version of it in which the novelty or rarity of the subject plays a preponderant part in choice and treatment. Of course the nature film or programme has an entertainment value; of course there are some social goods in the now ubiquitous availability of copies of other people’s images and opinions of actual things and events; but as with the Linnaean system, there is a cost. Being taken by camera into the deepest African jungle, across the Arctic wastes, thirty fathoms deep in the sea, may seem a ‘miracle of modern technology’; but it will no more bring the viewer nearer the reality of nature, or a proper human relationship with the actual nature around him, than merely reading novels is likely to teach the writing of them. The most one can say is that it may help; a much more common result is to be persuaded of the futility of even trying.”
― John Fowles, The Tree

“Naming things is always implicitly categorizing and therefore collecting them, attempting to own them; and because man is a highly acquisitive creature, brainwashed by most modern societies into believing that the act of acquisition is more enjoyable than the fact of having acquired, that getting beats having got, mere names and the objects they are tied to soon become stale. There”
― John Fowles, The Tree

“Fiziksel yönden, ben onların içinde hareket ediyorum; ama metafizik yöndense onlar benim içimde hareket ediyor sanki, tıpkı bir film seyrettiğimde fiziksel olarak bir yerde durduğum, ama kayan şeyin projektörden çıkan görüntüler olduğu gibi. Bütün yolculuklarda var olan bu, fiziksel hareketin içsel ya da mental olarak tersine dönmesi, romandan sinemaya kadar tüm anlatım sanatında en sevdiğim şeye, yani görülen bir şimdiden, gizli bir geleceğe doğru harekete çok benziyor.”
― John Fowles, The Tree

“Si valoro la existencia de los árboles por encima de cualquier otra cosa, de una manera muy”
― John Fowles, El árbol

“Only fools think our attitude to our fellow men is a thing distinct from our attitude to 'lesser' life.”
― John Fowles, The Tree

“Evolution had turned man into a sharply isolating creature, seeing the world not only anthropocentrically but singly, mirroring the way we like to think of our private selves.”
― John Fowles, The Tree

“These question-boundaries ...are ours, not of reality. We are led to them, caged by them not only culturally and intellectually, but quite physically, by the restlessness of our eyes and their limited field and acuity of vision.”
― John Fowles, The Tree