# Daniel Martin - Author: [John Fowles](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles.md) - Quotes: 39 - Book page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin ## Quotes > There was a bright wind, it was a Dufy day, all bustle, movement, animated colour.. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/there-was-a-bright.md) > There are people who have an instinctive yet perfect moral judgment, who can perform the most complex ethical calculations like an Indian peasant can sometimes perform astounding mathematical feats in a matter of seconds. Lily was such a person. I craved her approval. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/there-are-people.md) > The writing was impeccably neat and legible though rather crabbed into the centre of the page; I saw a neat crabbed man behind it. Presumably some sort of retreat, one of those desiccated young Catholics that used to mince around Oxford when I was an undergraduate. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/the-writing-was.md) > I still couldn’t accept that this was not some nightmare, like some freak misbinding in a book, a Lawrence novel become, at the turn of a page, one by Kafka. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/i-still-couldnt.md) > I played him the Goldberg Variations. If one wishes to reduce a sensitive German to tears there is no surer lachrymatory. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/i-played-him.md) > She had a kind of genius for picking the wrong man. She always looked for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole romantic kitchen, whereas I lived by a simpler diet, prose and pudding. I don’t expect attractive men to have attractive souls. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/she-had-a-kind.md) > All good science is art. And all good art is science. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/all-good-science.md) > Though not large it had a certain elegance; a pilastered portico, windows with graceful pediments. The whitewashed façade was in shadow, a palid blue against the evening sky’s pale blue. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/though-not-large.md) > All the time I felt I was being watched, that I was not alone, that I was putting on an act for the benefit of someone, that this action could be done only if it was spontaneous, pure – and moral. Because more and more it crept through my mind with the chill spring night that I was trying to commit not a moral action, but a fundamentally aesthetic one; to do something that would end my life sensationally, significantly, consistently. It was a Mercutio death I was looking for, not a real one. A death to be remembered, not the true death of a true suicide, the death obliterate. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/all-the-time.md) > It. Is. Not. Ended. There was just the trace of a humourless smile on his face; and more than a trace of menace. As if he meant something more than that there was a sequel to this scene; but that the whole Nazi weltanschaaung to be, resurrected and realised. He was an impressively iron man... [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/it-is-not.md) > I saw that this cataclysm must be an expiation for some barbarous crime of civilisation, some terrible human lie. What the lie was, I had too little knowledge of history to know then. I now know it was our believing that we were fulfilling some end, serving some plan, - that all would come out well in the end, because there was some great plan over all. Instead of the reality. There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/i-saw-that-this.md) > Utram bibis? Aquam an undam? [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/utram-bibis-aquam.md) > I didn’t know at that time Emily Dickinson’s great definition, her 'Publication is not the business of poets’; being a poet is all, being known as a poet is nothing. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/i-didnt-know.md) > If you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/if-you-are.md) > Perhaps the clue lay in indispensibility. I was being taught some obscure metaphysical lesson about the place of man in existence, about the limitations of the egocentric view... [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/perhaps-the-clue.md) > One kind of person is engaged in society without realizing it; another kind engages in society by controlling it. The one is a gear, a cog, and the other an engineer, a driver. But a person who has opted out has only his ability to express his disengagement between his existence and nothingness. Not cogito, but scribo, ergo sum. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/one-kind-of-person.md) > By this characteristically twentieth century retreat from content into form, from meaning into appearance, from ethics into aesthetics, from aqua into unda, I dulled the pain of accusing death, and hardened myself. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/by-this-characteristically.md) > Pois eisai? She wanted to know. Pou pas? The old Homeric questions of the Greek peasant. Who art thou? Where goest thou? [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/pois-eisai-she.md) > To my horror I began to cry...a great cloud of black guilt, knowledge of my atrocious selfishness, settled on me. One day she had said “when you love me (and she had not meant ‘make love to me’) it’s as if God forgave me for being the mess I am”; and I took it as chicanery, another emotional blackmail, to make me feel essential and give me a sense of responsibility towards her...My monstrous crime was Adam’s, the oldest and most vicious of all – male selfishness...Something far worse than lèse majesté. Lèse-humanité. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/to-my-horror.md) > She seemed older to me, over-experienced by travel; needing to be learnt again, and I hadn’t the energy. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/she-seemed-older.md) > "You sound like a certain kind of surgeon. A lot more interested in the operation than the patient." > > "I should not be in the hands of a surgeon who did not take that view." [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/you-sound-like.md) > Her voice was completely English. For some reason I had expected a foreign accent; but I could place this exactly. It was my own; product of boarding school, university, the accent of what a sociologist once called the Dominant Hundred Thousand. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/her-voice-was.md) > He liked to be popular and in place of charm had to dispense alcohol… [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/he-liked-to-be-popular.md) > I was not a poet. I felt no consolation in this knowledge, but only a red anger that evolution could allow such sensitivity and such inadequacy to coexist in the same mind. In one ego, my ego, screaming like a hare caught in a gin. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/i-was-not.md) > I hated myself. I had created nothing, I belonged to nothingness, to the néant, and it seemed to me that my own death was the only thing that I could create; and still, even then, I thought it might accuse everyone who had ever known me. It would validate all my cynicism, it would prove all my solitary selfishness; it would stand, and be remembered, as a final dark victory. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/i-hated-myself.md) > Hypotheses pinned me down, as Gulliver was pinned by the countless threads of the Lilliputians... [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/hypotheses-pinned-me-down.md) > I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope – an impotence, in short and to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all... [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/i-was-too.md) > I felt both a state of envy and contempt. The yacht itself was not vulgar, but I smelt something vulgar about owning it...A few moments later I set off back to my dull daily penal colony of an existence on the far side of the dream, as Adam left the Garden of Eden perhaps…except I knew there were no Gods, and nothing was going to bar my return... [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/i-felt-both.md) > The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed--thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes--because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself--and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/the-battle-was.md) > (The staff common room) was real boredom, not just modish ennui. Boredom, the numbing annual predictability of life, hung over the staff like a cloud. From it flowed cant, hypocrisy, and the impotent rage of the old who know they have failed and the young who suspect they will fail. The senior masters stood like Gallows sermons; with some of them one had a sort of vertigo, a glimpse of the bottomless pit of human futility...a sere notifier of what is. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/the-staff-common.md) > I saw that I was from now on, for ever, contemptible. I had been and remained, intensely depressed, but I had also been, and always would be, intensely false; in existentialist terms, inauthentic. I knew I would never kill myself, I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/i-saw-that.md) > I did not like the colonel at all. He had eyes like razors…the eyes of a machine. An educated machine… I realised he was drinking less than we were…And that he was playing with me. That he was a realist… Also that Anton was careless with his tongue... [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/i-did-not.md) > We were equally tired, in mid-century, of cold sanity and hot blasphemy; of the over-cerebral and of the over-faecal; the way out lay somewhere else. Words had lost their power, either for good or for evil; still hung, like a mist, over the reality of action, distorting, misleading, castrating; but at least since Hitler and Hiroshima they were seen to be a mist, a flimsy superstructure. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/we-were-equally.md) > Once again fear, and mystery, swept over me...I was infinitely far from home. The profoundest distances are never geographical... [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/once-again-fear.md) > So I strode down to the school like some vengence-brewing chieftain in an Icelandic saga... [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/so-i-strode.md) > I am talking about the general psychological health of the species, man. He needs the existence of mysteries, not their solution. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/i-am-talking.md) > The dinner that evening was dreadful, the epitome of English vacuity...they were all the same, each mind set in the same weird armour, like an archosaur’s ruff, like a fringe of icicles. All I heard the whole evening was the tinkle of broken ice-needles as people tried timidly and vainly to reach through the stale fence of words, tinkle, tinkle, and then withdraw. Nobody behaved with breadth, with warmth, with naturalness, and finally it became pathetic. We were all the same; I hardly said anything, but that made me no more innocent – or less conditioned. The solemn figures of the Old Country, the Queen, the Public School, Oxbridge, the Right Accent, People Like Us, stood around the table like secret police, ready to crush down in an instant on any attempt at an intelligent European humanity.* We…were held by those cloud-grey shapes on the world’s blue rim. Death machines holding thousands of gum-chewing, contraceptive-carrying men; for some reason more 30 years away than 30 miles; as if we were looking into the future, not the south; into a world where there were no more Prosperos, no private domains, no Poetries, fantasies, tender sexual promises...I felt acutely the fragility of time itself... [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/the-dinner-that.md) > Narcissism: when one grows too old to believe in one's uniqueness, one falls in love with one's complexity. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/narcissism-when-one.md) > I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria. p. 1 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/daniel-martin/i-was-born.md)