# Quote — John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman

> A tiny wren perched on top of a bramble not ten feet from him and trilled its violent song. He saw its glittering black eyes, the red and yellow of its song-gaped throat — a midget ball of feathers that yet managed to make itself the Announcing Angel of evolution: I am that I am, thou shalt not pass my being now. He stood as Pisanello's saint stood, astonished perhaps more at his own astonishment at this world's existing so close, so within reach of all that suffocating banality of ordinary day. In those few moments of defiant song, any ordinary hour or place — and therefore the vast infinity of all Charles's previous hours and places — seemed vulgarized, coarsened, made garish. The appallimg ennui of human reality lay cleft to the core; and the heart of all life pulsed there in the wren's triumphant throat.

- Author: [John Fowles](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles.md)
- Book: [The French Lieutenant's Woman](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/the-french-lieutenants-woman.md)
- Page: 233
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Fowles#The_French_Lieutenant's_Woman_(1969)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/the-french-lieutenants-woman/a-tiny-wren

## More from this book

> In a vivid Insight, a flash of black lightning, he [Charles] saw that all life was parallel: that evolution was not vertical, ascending to a perfection, but horizontal. Time was the great fallacy; existence was without history, was always now, was always this being caught in the same fiendish machine. All those painted screens erected by man to shut out reality — history, religion, duty, social position, all were illusions, mere opium fantasies.

p. 200 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/the-french-lieutenants-woman/in-a-vivid.md)

> Darwinism, as its shrewder opponents realized, let open the floodgates to something far more serious than the undermining of the Biblical account of the origins of man; its deepest implications lay in the direction of determinism and behaviourism, that is, towards philosophies that reduce morality to a hypocrisy and duty to a straw hut in a hurricane.

p. 119 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/the-french-lieutenants-woman/darwinism-as-its.md)

> Sometimes I almost pity them [other women]. I think I have a freedom they cannot understand. No insult, no blame, can touch me. Because I have set myself beyond the pale. I am nothing. I am hardly human any more. I am the French Lieutenant's Whore.

p. 171 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-fowles/the-french-lieutenants-woman/sometimes-i-almost.md)