If it doesn't change your life, you're not doing it right.

My collection of passages from The Magus.  I'm not going into this with a particular end in mind, so let's see what we come up with.


"Once more I was a man in a myth, incapable of understanding it, but somehow aware that understanding it meant it must continue, however sinister its peripateia" (Chapter 49)
 --[Note: Peripeteia (because the word 'peripateia' doesn't appear to exist) -  In classical tragedy (and hence in other forms of drama, fiction, etc.): a point in the plot at which a sudden reversal occurs. In extended use: a sudden or dramatic change; a crisis.(OED)]

"We are all actors here, my friend.  None of us is what we really are.  We all lie some of the time, and some of all the time" (Chapter 52)
--A little commentary on, not only the novel, but life itself.


Since we discussed the value (or absence of value, in the wrong hands) of writing in a book, here is the only thing that was written in my book.  Of all the 656 pages of my copy of the book, the only mark in my book that was not made by me is a bracket on pg 409 and demonstrates that someone thought this portion of the novel was the only part that merited any attention.

---------
     'I should not like to be in the hands of a surgeon who did not take that view.'
     'Then your ... meta-theatre is really a medical one?'
     Maria's shadow appeared behind him as she brought a soup-tureen to the white-and-silver table in its pool of lamplight.
     'You may see it so.  I prefer to think of it as a metaphysical one.'  Maria announced that we could take our seats.  He acknowledged her words with a little boy, but did not move.  'It is all an attempt to escape from such categories.'
     'More an art than a science?'
     'All good science is art.  And all good art is science.'
     With this fine-sounding but hollow apophthegm he put down his glass and moved towards the table.
---------   (Chapter 52)

--It starts mid conversation, and ends mid paragraph.  I can't tell whether her or she thought this was the only important part, or the only unimportant part.


"I did not pray for her, because prayer has no efficacy; I did not cry for her, or for myself, because only extraverts cry twice; but I sat in the silence of that night, that infinite hostility to man, to permanence, to love, remembering her, remembering her" (Chapter 54)
--If this is not Fowles as his most eloquent, he was never eloquent.