Frasi di John Fowles pagina 3

“Ci sono solo due razze su questo pianeta: gli intelligenti e gli stupidi.”

The French Lieutenant's Woman

“I pigri intelligenti hanno sempre grandi ambizioni, per giustificare la propria pigrizia alla propria intelligenza.”

“Non si fa la felicità di molti facendoli correre prima che abbiano imparato a camminare.”

da La donna del tenente francese

“Il dovere consiste principalmente nel fingere che il banale è cruciale.”

da La donna del tenente francese

“Ernestina aveva esattamente il viso che andava bene per quell'epoca, cioè ovale, col mento piccolo, delicato come una violetta. Potete ancora vederlo nei disegni dei grandi illustratori di allora, nell'opera di Phiz o di John Leech. Il grigio degli occhi e il pallore della pelle non facevano che accentuare la delicatezza del resto. A un primo incontro sapeva abbassare gli occhi con molta grazia, quasi avesse temuto di svenire se un uomo le avesse rivolto la parola. Ma c'era una minuscola inclinazione all'angolo delle palpebre, cui ne corrispondeva un'altra all'angolo delle labbra - per conservare la stessa similitudine. lieve come la fragranza delle violette di febbraio - che smentiva, sottilissimamente ma inconfondibilmente, la sua apparente obbedienza totale al grande dio Maschio.”

da Il mago

“Che cos'è l'Ottocento? Un'epoca nella quale la donna era sacra, e si poteva comprare una ragazza di tredici anni per poche sterline, o pochi scellini se la si voleva soltanto per un'ora o due. Nella quale si costruirono più chiese che in tutta la precedente storia del paese, e a Londra una casa su sessanta era un bordello (la proporzione moderne sarebbe pressappoco una su seimila). Nella quale la santità del matrimonio (e della castità prematrimoniale) era esaltata da ogni pulpito, in tutti gli editoriali e nei pubblici comizi, e grandi personaggi pubblici - dal futuro re in giù - conducevano una vita assolutamente scandalosa. Nella quale venne gradatamente umanizzato il sistema penale, e la flagellazione era talmente diffusa che un francese cercò seriamente di dimostrare che il marchese De Sade doveva essere d'origine inglese. Nella quale il corpo femminile era più che mai celato agli occhi indiscreti, e i meriti degli scultori erano valutati in base alla loro capacità di scolpire donne nude. Nella quale non esiste un romanzo, una commedia o una poesia di un certo livello letterario che si spinga oltre la sessualità di un bacio […], mentre la popolazione di opere pornografiche raggiungeva un livello mai superato. Nella quale non si nominavano mai le funzioni escretorie, e le condizioni igieniche erano ancora talmente primitive […] che dovevano esserci poche case e poche strade che non le ricordassero in continuazione. Nella quale si sosteneva all'unanimità che le donne non hanno orgasmo, e si insegnava a ogni prostituta come simularlo. Nella quale ci furono progressi enormi in tutti gli altri settori dell'attività umana, e soltanto tirannide nel più personale e fondamentale”

The French Lieutenant's Woman

John Fowles Frasi e Citazioni

“Forse voi credete che i romanzieri abbiano sempre un piano predeterminato per il loro lavoro, e che il futuro previsto nel primo capitolo sia sempre, inesorabilmente, il presente del tredicesimo. In realtà i romanzieri scrivono per un'infinita varietà di ragioni: per il denaro, per la fama, per i recensori, per i genitori, per gli amici, per le persone amate; per vanità, per orgoglio, per curiosità, per divertimento: nello stesso modo in cui gli abili mobilisti godono nel fare mobili, gli ubriaconi amano bere, i giudici giudicare e i siciliani scaricare la carabina nella schiena di un nemico. Potrei riempire un libro di queste ragioni, e sarebbero tutte vere, ma non vere per tutti. Una sola ragione è comune a tutti noi:. Per questo non possiamo far piani. Sappiamo bene che il mondo è un organismo e non una macchina. Sappiamo anche che un mondo autenticamente creato deve essere indipendente dal suo creatore, che un mondo pianificato (un mondo che riveli totalmente la sua progettazione) è un mondo morto. Incominciamo a vivere soltanto quando i nostri personaggi e i nostri eventi cominciano a disobbedirci.”

The French Lieutenant's Woman

“Ogni epoca, ogni epoca colpevole, erige alte mura intorno alle sue Versailles; e io personalmente le odio ancora di più quando vengono costruite dalla letteratura e dall'arte.”

The French Lieutenant's Woman

“Sono gli stessi gradini dai quali Jane Austen fa cadere Louisa Musgrove in." "Come è romantico." "Gli uomini erano romantici… allora.”

The French Lieutenant's Woman

“Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.”

The French Lieutenant's Woman

John Fowles: Frasi in inglese

John Fowles libro The Magus

Origine: The Magus (1965), Ch. 18

“You use your life.”

“I hated myself. I had created nothing, I belonged to nothingness, to the néant, and it seemed to me that my own death was the only thing that I could create; and still, even then, I thought it might accuse everyone who had ever known me. It would validate all my cynicism, it would prove all my solitary selfishness; it would stand, and be remembered, as a final dark victory.”

John Fowles libro The Collector

The Collector

“I didn’t know at that time Emily Dickinson’s great definition, her 'Publication is not the business of poets’; being a poet is all, being known as a poet is nothing.”

John Fowles libro Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“It. Is. Not. Ended. There was just the trace of a humourless smile on his face; and more than a trace of menace. As if he meant something more than that there was a sequel to this scene; but that the whole Nazi weltanschaaung to be, resurrected and realised. He was an impressively iron man…”

John Fowles libro Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“There are only two races on this planet — the intelligent and the stupid.”

John Fowles libro Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“Narcissism: when one grows too old to believe in one's uniqueness, one falls in love with one's complexity.”

As quoted in Daily Telegraph (15 August 1991)

“We were equally tired, in mid-century, of cold sanity and hot blasphemy; of the over-cerebral and of the over-faecal; the way out lay somewhere else. Words had lost their power, either for good or for evil; still hung, like a mist, over the reality of action, distorting, misleading, castrating; but at least since Hitler and Hiroshima they were seen to be a mist, a flimsy superstructure.”

John Fowles libro Daniel Martin

Origine: Daniel Martin (1977), Ch. 2, Games

“All the time I felt I was being watched, that I was not alone, that I was putting on an act for the benefit of someone, that this action could be done only if it was spontaneous, pure – and moral. Because more and more it crept through my mind with the chill spring night that I was trying to commit not a moral action, but a fundamentally aesthetic one; to do something that would end my life sensationally, significantly, consistently. It was a Mercutio death I was looking for, not a real one. A death to be remembered, not the true death of a true suicide, the death obliterate.”

John Fowles libro Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“The mess of my life, the selfishnesses and false turnings and the treacheries, all these things could fall into place, they could become a source of construction rather than a source of chaos, and precisely because I had no other choice.”

John Fowles libro Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“When she was home from her boarding-school I used to see her almost every day sometimes, because their house was right opposite the Town Hall Annexe. She and her younger sister used to go in and out a lot, often with young men, which of course I didn’t like. When I had a free moment from the files and ledgers I stood by the window and used to look down over the road over the frosting and sometimes I’d see her. In the evening I marked it in my observations diary, at first with X, and then when I knew her name with M.”

John Fowles libro The Magus

Origine: The Magus (1965), Ch. 27

“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.”

John Fowles libro The Collector

The Collector (1963)

“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.”

John Fowles libro Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“By this characteristically twentieth century retreat from content into form, from meaning into appearance, from ethics into aesthetics, from aqua into unda, I dulled the pain of accusing death, and hardened myself.”

John Fowles libro Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“Years later I saw the gabbia at Piacenza; a harsh black canary-cage strung up high the side of the the towering campanile, in which prisoners were once left to starve to death and rot in full view of the town below. And looking up at it, I remembered that winter in Greece, that Gabbia I had constructed for myself out of light, solitude and self-delusions. My feelings at the end of that wretched term, were those of a man who knows he is in a cage, exposed to the jeers of all his old ambitions until he dies.”

John Fowles libro Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“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.”

John Fowles libro The Magus

Introduction (1977 edition)
The Magus (1965)

“So I strode down to the school like some vengence-brewing chieftain in an Icelandic saga…”

John Fowles libro Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“She had a kind of genius for picking the wrong man. She always looked for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole romantic kitchen, whereas I lived by a simpler diet, prose and pudding. I don’t expect attractive men to have attractive souls.”

John Fowles libro Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“He’s so slow, so unimaginative, so lifeless. Like zinc white. I see it’s a sort of tyranny he has over me. He forces me to be changeable, to act. To show off. The hateful tyranny of weak people.”

John Fowles libro Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope – an impotence, in short and to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all…”

John Fowles libro The Collector

The Collector (1963)

“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.”

John Fowles libro Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“If you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.”

John Fowles libro Daniel Martin

Origine: Daniel Martin (1977), Ch. 1, p. 1

“(The staff common room) was real boredom, not just modish ennui. Boredom, the numbing annual predictability of life, hung over the staff like a cloud. From it flowed cant, hypocrisy, and the impotent rage of the old who know they have failed and the young who suspect they will fail. The senior masters stood like Gallows sermons; with some of them one had a sort of vertigo, a glimpse of the bottomless pit of human futility…a sere notifier of what is.”

John Fowles libro Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“Once again fear, and mystery, swept over me…I was infinitely far from home. The profoundest distances are never geographical…”

John Fowles libro Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“Everything free and decent in life is being locked away in filthy little cellars by beastly people who don’t care.”

John Fowles libro Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“The writing was impeccably neat and legible though rather crabbed into the centre of the page; I saw a neat crabbed man behind it. Presumably some sort of retreat, one of those desiccated young Catholics that used to mince around Oxford when I was an undergraduate.”

John Fowles libro The Collector

The Collector (1963)

“Paint. Just paint. This is my advice. And leave the clever talk to the poor sods who can't.”

John Fowles libro Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“…even more ominous … is the fact that since the Second World War a new kind of intellectual has emerged in large numbers. … he is only minimally interested in the proper intellectual significance of images and objects. Such people are not really intellectuals, but visuals … A visual is more interested in style than in content … A visual does not feel a rioting crowd being machine-gunned by the police, he simply sees a brilliant news photograph.”

John Fowles libro The Ebony Tower

The Ebony Tower (1974)

“Though not large it had a certain elegance; a pilastered portico, windows with graceful pediments. The whitewashed façade was in shadow, a palid blue against the evening sky’s pale blue.”

John Fowles libro The Aristos

The Aristos (1964)

“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.”

John Fowles libro Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)