The French Lieutenant's Woman Quotes
"Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man himself." - Marx, Zur Judenfrage (1844)
"The most disagreeable wind in Lyme Bay is an easterly." - John Fowles
"Primitive yet complex, elephantine but delicate; as full of subtle curves and volumes as a Henry Moore or a Michelangelo." - Description of the Cobb
"Your father ventured the opinion that Mr. Darwin should be exhibited in a cage in the zoological gardens." - Charles
"I meant it to be very honest of me." - Charles
"The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time." - John Fowles
"I confess your worthy father and I had a small philosophical disagreement." - Charles
"What's done, is what remains! Ah, blessed they who leave completed tasks of love to stay and answer mutely for them, being dead, Life was not purposeless, though Life be fled." - Mrs. Norton, The Lady of La Garaye (1863)
"At my age, spiritual health is all that counts."
"There is a world of difference between what may be accepted in London and what is proper here."
"It is not only that he has begun to gain an autonomy; I must respect it."
"We wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is."
"Fiction is woven into all, as a Greek observed some two and a half thousand years ago."
"I am a Derby duck, sir. I'm a bloomin' Derby duck."
"Never, believe me, I knew of the feelings between men and women."
"I feel cast on a desert island, imprisoned, condemned, and I know not what crime it is for."
"We make our destinies by our choice of gods."
"Medicine can do nothing. You must not think she is like us men, able to reason clearly, examine her motives, understand why she behaves as she does."
"We got by very well without the Iron Civilizer when I was a young man."
"In this age of steam and cant, I could forgive a man anything --except Vital Religion."
"No gentleman who cares for his good name can be seen with the scarlet woman of Lyme."
"I must congratulate you. You have a genius for finding eyries."
"Miss Woodruff, I detest immorality. But morality without mercy I detest rather more."
"The first thing I admired in him was his courage. I did not then know that men can be both very brave and very false."
"Perhaps it was out of a timid modesty, yet he began very distinctly to sense that he was being challenged to coax the mystery out of her."
"Morality without mercy I detest rather more."
"No doubt for lack of wax, this note was unsealed, which explained why it was couched in governess French."
"Confidence in the practitioner is half of medicine."
"But morality without mercy I detest rather more."
"I am a young woman of superior intelligence and some education. I think the world has done badly by me."
"Now pity is a thing that takes a devil of a lot of feeding."
"Mrs. Fairley was yesterday at the dairy out there on Ware Cleeves. The girl walked flagrantly out of the woods under her nose."
"You must think of her like that. Not as some malicious schemer."
"She lives from day to day. Indeed she must. No one of foresight could have behaved as she has."
"What did Socrates die for? A keeping social face? A homage to decorum?"
"I am not made for marriage. My misfortune is to have realized it too late."
"The best wines take the longest to mature, do they not?"
"The sweet of true Repentance is the gate to Holy Bliss."
"I am an enigma to myself. I do not love her. How could I? A woman so compromised, a woman you tell me is mentally diseased."
"No witness to the vision call, Beholding, unbeheld of all..."
"When eyes that erst could meet with ease, Do seek, yet, seeking, shyly shun Ecstatic conscious unison."
"And leaps into the future chance, Submitting all things to desire."
"I suggest you purchase some instrument of torture. I am sure Mrs. Fairley will be pleased to help you use it."
"For him the tragedy of Homo sapiens is that the least fit to survive breed the most."
"Each night since she had first counted those ten golden coins, she had counted them again. Not like a miser, but as one who goes to see some film again and again--out of an irresistible pleasure in the story, in certain images..."
"She was simply enjoying the first holiday of her adult life."
"But to recall them was to be a prisoner waking from a dream that he was free and trying to stand, only to be jerked down by his chains back into the black reality of his cell."
"In spite of her very different profession she had very much the mind of Mrs. Endicott down in Exeter, albeit her assessments were made in guineas rather than shillings."
"He did not feel nobly decent; but as if he had swallowed an insult or funked a duel."
"Never mind that such marriages were traditional in his class; the tradition had sprung from an age when polite marriage was a publicly accepted business contract that neither husband nor wife was expected to honor much beyond its terms: money for rank."
"There's lots o' things yours truly wouldn't 'ave believed possible, Mrs. R. As 'as 'appened hall the same."
"He felt himself boiling, intolerable. If there had been a sharp spike in front of him he would, echoing Sarah before the thorn tree, have run his hand through it, so strong was his feeling for maceration, punishment, some action that would lance his bile."
"Perhaps one can find more color for the myth of a rational human behavior in an iron age like the Victorian than in most others."
"It was as if he would never have solitude again. What little was left, he must enjoy."
"Duty--that's to say complying with whate'er's expected here."
"All the questing and the guessing of the soul's own soul within."
"It's the coward acquiescence in a destiny's behest."
"People sink out of sight, drown in the shadows of closer things."
"One lived by irony and sentiment, one observed convention."
"In a world of larger scope, what here is faithfully begun will be completed, not undone."
"Each day, Charles, each hour, it has to be taken again."
"It is immoral in a man to believe more than he can spontaneously receive."
"I have forbidden myself to regret the impossible."
"I have found new affections. But they are not of the kind you suggest."
"I have since seen artists destroy work that might to the amateur seem perfectly good."
"If an artist is not his own sternest judge he is not fit to be an artist."
"I see it was posted in London. You have no idea ..."
"I have varied and congenial work--work so pleasant that I no longer think of it as such."
"I am happy, I am at last arrived, or so it seems to me, where I belong."
"I am not to seek it elsewhere. I am to see it as precarious, as a thing of which I must not allow myself to be bereft."
"You may think what you will of me, but I cannot wish my life other than it is at the moment."
"I do not wish to marry because ... first, because of my past, which habituated me to loneliness."
"I have taken that into consideration."
"It is not you I fear. It is your love for me. I know only too well that nothing remains sacrosanct there."
"I thought much of you to begin with. I thought much of you some six months later, when I first saw one of the notices you had had put in."
"And which obliged me to change my lodgings and my name."
"I knew nothing but unhappiness could come from such a meeting as this."
"I think you lie. I think you reveled in the thought of my misery."
"She is Greek. From lalageo, to babble like a brook."
"Evolution is simply the process by which chance cooperates with natural law to create living forms better and better adapted to survive."
"I am astounded that you should think a stranger to me could extenuate your behavior."
"What a less honorable gentleman might have guessed some time ago."
"You have not only planted the dagger in my breast, you have delighted in twisting it."