John Fowles (1926 – 2005)
English novelist and essayist.
I still couldn’t accept that this was not some nightmare, like some freak misbinding in a book, a Lawrence novel become, at the turn of a page, one by Kafka.
"You sound like a certain kind of surgeon. A lot more interested in the operation than the patient." "I should not be in the hands of a surgeon who did not take that view."
Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical. Ch. 18
"I played him the Goldberg Variations. If one wishes to reduce a sensitive German to tears there is no surer lachrymatory."
Once again fear, and mystery, swept over me...I was infinitely far from home. The profoundest distances are never geographical...
She seemed older to me, over-experienced by travel; needing to be learnt again, and I hadn’t the energy.
There was a bright wind, it was a Dufy day, all bustle, movement, animated colour..
The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed--thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes--because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself--and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud.