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

> She turned to look at him — or as it seemed to Charles, through him. It was not so much what was positively in that face which remained with him after that first meeting, but all that was not as he had expected; for theirs was an age when the favoured feminine look was the demure, the obedient, the shy. Charles felt immediately as if he had trespassed; as if the Cobb belonged to that face, and not to the Ancient Borough of Lyme. It was not a pretty face like Ernestina's. It was certainly not a beautiful face, by any period's standard or taste. But it was an unforgettable face, and a tragic face. Its sorrow welled out of it as purely, naturally and unstoppably as water out of a woodland spring. There was no artifice there, no hypocrisy, no hysteria, no mask; and above all, no sign of madness. The madness was in the empty sea, the empty horizon, the lack of reason for such sorrow; as if the spring was natural in itself, but unnatural in welling from a desert.

- 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: 16
- 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/she-turned-to-look

## 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)