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The tender pragmatisms of flesh have poetries no enigma, human or divine, can diminish or demean - indeed, it can only cause them, and then walk out.

— John Fowles The Ebony Tower (1974)

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Poetry

More quotes by John Fowles

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

The Collector (1963)

There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.

The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969)

It must essentially remain a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent.

The Magus (1965)

Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.

The Magus (1965)

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

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There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature (1836)

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

T. S. Eliot Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity...but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.

George Chapman Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595)

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

Michael Faraday

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John Fowles (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.