The Magus by John Fowles

This was unlike any book I've ever read... such a strange, convoluted tale. It demands the curiosity and doggedness of the reader as much as it does the eagerness of Nicholas to want to know and experience more. I loved the whole idea of this microcosmic, isolated journey of a man towards self-knowledge, how it was by turns hopeful and frustrating, graphic and sweet, so intellectually rewarding, and ooooh my goodness now I want to clamber all over an uninhabited Grecian island in all of its harsh and unforgiving beauty. Thanks Nolan!

"She stood there in her white dress, small, innocent-corrupt, coarse-fine, an expert novice." (30)

"It was not only the solitude -- it was Greece. It made conventional English notions of what was moral and immoral ridiculous; whether or not I did the socially unforgivable seemed in itself merely a matter of appetite, like smoking or not smoking a new brand of cigarette -- as trivial as that, from a moral point of view." (59)

"I had guessed, as she had talked, what was missing from her account of her abortive love affaire: the delicate balance in her of physical timidity and sensual imagination... the first must have made the man attractive to her initially, the second had condemned him when it came to the point -- all of which gave her a genuinely nymphlike quality; one her sister, despite her playing of the part that night, lacked. This girl did quite literally flee the satyr and invite him on. There was a wild animal in her, but a true wild animal, intensely suspicious of wrong moves, of too obvious attemps to tame. She set little boundaries, almost like snares, to see if one understood -- behaved, advanced, withdrew, as she wanted. Yet behind it all I foresaw an eventual place without boundaries, where she would one day allow me anything..." (374-375)

"I looked round the trees. Somewhere eyes were on me. But nothing moved. The dry trees in the sun, the scrub in the lifeless shadow. Once again fear, fear and mystery, swept over me. The thin net of reality, these trees, this sun. I was infinitely far from home. The profoundest distances are never geographical." (467)

"...that evening I went to an Italian restaurant we had once been fond of; Alison had been fond of. It was still the same, popular with the poorer academic and artistic population of Bloomsbury: research graduates, out-of-work actors, publishers' staff, mostly young, and my own kind. The clientele had not changed, but I had. I listened to the chatter around me; and was offput, and then alienated, by its insularity, its suddenly seen innocence. I looked round, to try to find someone I might hypothetically want to know better, become friendly with; and there was no one. It was the unneeded confirmation of my loss of Englishness; and it occured to me that I must be feeling as Alison had so often felt: a mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless . . . speciesless." (584-585)

(1978 revised edition. New York: Dell, 1985)