All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
John FowlesRead
People knew less of each other, perhaps, but they felt more free of each other, and so were more individual. The entire world was not for them only a push or a switch away. Strangers were strange, and sometimes with an exciting, beautiful strangeness. It may be better for humanity that we should communicate more and more.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects on the balance between individual freedom and communication in society.
John Fowles suggests that while people may have less knowledge about each other, this lack of familiarity allows for greater individuality and freedom. The excitement in the unfamiliarity of strangers adds vitality to life, yet the quote also contemplates the implications of communication's increasing prevalence, hinting at the potential benefits it may bring to humanity by bridging these gaps.
Themes
FreedomIndividualityCommunicationStrangersHumanity
In practice
Example use cases
This quote would be perfect for a discussion on the importance of individuality at a philosophy seminar.
More from John Fowles
All quotes →There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.
John FowlesRead
I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.
John FowlesRead
Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?
John FowlesRead
The bowed head, the buried face. She is silent, she will never speak, never forgive, never reach a hand, never leave this frozen present tense. All waits, suspended. Suspended the autumn trees, the autumn sky, anonymous people. A blackbird, poor fool, sings out of season from the willows by the lake. A flight of pigeons over the houses; fragments of freedom, hazard, an anagram made flesh. And somewhere the stinging smell of burning leaves.
John FowlesRead
It came to me…that I didn’t want to be anywhere else in the world at that moment, that what I was feeling at that moment justified all I had been through, because all I had been through was my being there. I was experiencing…a new self-acceptance, a sense that I had to be this mind and this body, its vices and its virtues, and that I had no other chance or choice.
John FowlesRead
Similar quotes
Celebration is not because some desire is fulfilled - because no desire is ever fulfilled. Desire as such cannot be fulfilled. Desire is only a way to avoid the present moment. Desire creates the future and takes you far away. Desire is a drug; it keeps you stoned, it does not allow you to see the reality - that which is herenow.
RajneeshRead
I doubt that religion can survive deep understanding. The shallows are its natural habitat. Cranks and fundamentalists are too often victimised as scapegoats for religion in general. It is only quite recently that Christianity reinvented itself in non-fundamentalist guise, and Islam has yet to do so.
Richard DawkinsRead
Justice is the crowning glory of the virtues.
Marcus Tullius CiceroRead
We humans are really good at forming groups to compete, and then dissolving the groups and reforming them along different lines to compete in a different way.
Jonathan HaidtRead
Being equally convinced that aggression and rudeness are synonymous with having a "powerful personality."
Paulo CoelhoRead
What we need to realize is that there can be, shall we say, a movement, a stirring among people, which can be organically designed instead of politically designed.
Alan WattsRead