John Fowles Quotes

That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see the relationships between objects.

Women are a finer filter of reality. They can sniff things.

The woman's vision is deep reaching, the man's far reaching. With the man the world is his heart, with the woman the heart is her world.

Dogs are mute and obedient, but they have watched us and know us and can smell how pitiful we are.

Tact is after all a kind of mind reading.

Sometimes I see through things when people are talking. I'm really sensitive to other people, so I can tell if somebody's putting on a front.

Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.

Women think with their whole bodies and they see things as a whole more than men do.

It's one thing to think about something, but it's another thing to actually feel it.

I know when people are with me or not. It's an instinct.

Not to believe in love is a great sign of dullness. There are some people so indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection rests on circumstantial evidence.

To know each other we must reach beyond the sphere of our sense perceptions.

A man of fine perceptions is more truly feminine than a merely sentimental woman.

All can hear, but only the sensitive can understand.

Women have an incredible ability to pick up on emotional signals. For example, there are some wolves that are so clever they have learned to dress up like sheep. Man says, "Looks like a sheep. Talks like a sheep." Woman says, "Ain't no sheep!"

In war you see your own troubles; those of the enemy you cannot see. You must show confidence.

Rose: You have a gift Jack, you do. You see people. Jack: I see you. Rose: And? Jack: You wouldn't have jumped.

Those who cannot hear an angry shout may strain to hear a whisper.

And when I came in with tears in my eyes, you always knew whether I needed you to hold me or just let me be. I don't know how you knew, but you did, and you made it easier for me.

If you know somebody very well, like your grandmother or your baby sister, you will know when they are real and when they are fake.

The degree to which one is sensitive to other people's suffering, to other (people's) humanity, is the index of one's own humanity

There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding, above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have.

Some things were made to be felt

I must know, he thinks. It must be clear to me. There is a world which is closed to him, a world of shadings, gradations, nuances, and subtleties. He is a genius and yet he is too explicit. June slips between his fingers. You cannot posses without loving.

Receptivity requires a nimbleness, a fine-honed sensitivity in order to let one's self be the vehicle of whatever vision may emerge.