John Fowles

The princess calls, but there is no one, now, to hear her.

That's all. Just paint. That's my advice. Leave the clever talk to the poor sods who can't.

That is the truth. Not the hammer and sickle. Not the stars and stripes. Not the cross. Not the sun. Not gold. Not yin and yang. But the smile.

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.

There’s a card in the Tarot pack called The Magus. The magician, conjuror. Two of his traditional symbols are the lily and the rose.

There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.

Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.

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.

It must essentially remain a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent.

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.

If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence.

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.