All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
John FowlesRead
An answer is always a form of death.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote suggests that providing answers can limit understanding and exploration, as certainty can lead to an end of inquiry.
John Fowles' quote suggests that providing answers is not just about informing; it can also signify the end of exploration and curiosity. When we arrive at conclusions or definitive answers, we may cease to ask further questions, stifling the inherent human desire to discover and understand. In this way, answering can metaphorically represent a form of death, as it curtails the journey of learning and growth, replacing inquiry with finality.
Themes
AnswersDeathInquiryCuriosityPhilosophy
In practice
Example use cases
In a debate on knowledge and certainty, one might use this quote to highlight the dangers of finality.
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
Pain and guilt can't be taken away with the wave of a magic wand. They're the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves. I don't want my pain taken away! I need my pain!
William ShatnerRead
It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It's better not to know so much about what things mean. Because the meaning, it's a very personal thing, and the meaning for me is different than the meaning for somebody else.
David LynchRead
For the Amahuaca, the Koyukon, the Apache, and the diverse Aboriginal peoples of Australia - as for numerous other indigenous peoples - the coherence of human language is inseparable from the coherence of the surrounding ecology, from the expressive vitality of the more-than-human terrain. It is the animate earth that speaks; human speech is but a part of that vaster discourse.
David AbramRead
We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
Edward R. MurrowRead
What kind of people do they [the Japanese] think we are?
Winston ChurchillRead
Either kill me or take me as I am, because I'll be damned if I ever change.
Marquis De SadeRead