In a vivid Insight, a flash of black lightning, he [Charles] saw that all life was parallel: that evolution… — John Fowles
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. 200Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
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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
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
For a moment, in that dark Dorset night, reason and science dissolved; life was a dark machine, a sinister astrology, a verdict at birth and without appeal, a zero over all.
p. 229
