Daniel Martin
John Fowles
Top 10 Best Quotes
“She smiled at him as they waited for their dessert, her chin poised on her clasped hands. 'You're being very silent.' 'That's how men cry.”
“Images are inherently fascistic because they overstamp the truth, however dim and blurred, of the real past experience; as if, faced with ruins, we must turn architects, not archeologists.”
“We think we grow old, we grow wise and more tolerant; we just grow more lazy.”
“Perhaps twenty minutes later he realized she had gone to sleep. He quietly removed his now stiff arm, then turned away. It must have woken her a little After a moment he felt her turn as well and lay a hand, instinctively, like a sleeping wife, across his hips; as if, in some dream, he was the one who escaped.”
“We drove east back down to Santa Fe in the splendid evening air, all roses and ochres and greens, with the tree-covered folds in the mountains behind the town lying like a gigantic crumpled velvet rug; a limpid and cloudless winter sky above, a light no camera has ever captured… I have never quite understood why some places exert this deep personal attraction, why at them one’s past seems in some mysterious way to meet one’s future, one that was somehow always to be there as well as being there in reality”
“There was no art in cultures as ancient as the Egyptian and the Minoan. Conscious art did not exist for them. They wanted only to control. That is how they would want us to judge them - by how well they controlled”
“That perhaps all the stupidity, and the violence and the conformity are just the price of keeping a national energy alive… that day you took me round the Farmer’s Market, just to show me how they’ve bred their fruit and vegetables to fit Madison Avenue notions of what they ought to look like… the heresy that size and looks are everything”
“It seemed insane that two such identical senses of humour could think of each other only in terms of hatred and destruction. He suddenly saw the political establishments of the world as a conspiracy of the humourless against laughter, a tyranny of stupidity over intelligence; man as a product of history, not his true inner, personal nature. He might, if he had browsed further in the book he had picked up in JAne’s drawing room in Oxford, have seen that Gramsci once said almost exactly the same thing, though he had derived his proof of it from the failure of mankind to make socialism universal. Dan saw it much more in existential terms, a universal failure of personal authenticity, faith in one’s own inner feelings.”
“In some profound way, beyond all his reasons and his experience, he was no more than an egoist - he had what I had always detected, and loathed, in Conservative philosophy… the belief that the fortunate must at all costs be allowed to retain their good fortune”
“He stood before the famous Rembrandt self portrait. The sad, proud old man stared eternally out of his canvas, out of the entire knowledge of his own genius and of the inadequacy of genius before human reality.”
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Book Keywords:
silence, john-fowles, images, cry, loneliness, love, older, ruin, behaviour, silent, men, past, nostalgia, lazy, inspirational, sleep, humor, dream, photography, memory
