“Such people. I must have stood next to them in the tube, passed them in the street, of course I overheard them and knew they existed. But never really believed they exist. So totally blind. It never seemed possible.”

The Collector, John Fowles

“He felt his clumsiness, his stiffness, her greater dignity than his; perhaps he still felt her lips.”

The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles

“It was not only her profound ignorance of the reality of copulation that frightened her; it was the aura of pain and brutality that the act seemed to require, and which seemed to deny all the gentleness of gesture and discreetness of permitted caress that so attracted her in Charles. She had once or twice seen animals couple; the violence haunted her mind.”

The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles