68+ Sebastian Faulks Quotes On Slavery, Education And Freedom

Sebastian Faulks is a British novelist, journalist, and broadcaster. He is best known for his 1993 novel, Birdsong, which was adapted into a television drama in 2012. His other works include The Girl at the Lion d'Or, Charlotte Gray, and Human Traces. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Sebastian Faulks on slavery, education, freedom.

Top 10 Sebastian Faulks Quotes

1. The end-of-summer winds make people restless.
2. Inhale and hold the evening in your lungs.
3. Life can be lived at a remove. You trade in futures, and then you trade in derivatives of futures. Banks make more money trading derivatives than they do trading actual commodities.
4. That's what opium does to suffering: makes it of hypothetical interest only.
5. If I could eat only one thing for the rest of my life, it would be rhubarb fool, which I make with ginger and a hint of elderflower cordial.
6. I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.
7. Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.
8. We're deaf men working as musicians; we play the music but we can't hear it.
9. I don't find life unbearably grave. I find it almost intolerably frivolous.
10. The best thing is the combined effect of nicotine with alcohol, greater than the sum of the two parts.

Sebastian Faulks Short Quotes

• You can't recall someone whose name has worn away.
• A bit of the vagueness of music stops you going completely mad, I imagine.
• I don't like being rumbled, I like to be invisible.
• The thunder of false modesty was deafening.
• It's only after the change is fully formed that you can see what's happened.
• The past was suddenly rushing in on me in a way I found hard to fight.
• I never for a moment considered killing myself, because it wouldn't have achieved anything.
• The thing about opium is that it makes pain or difficulty unimaginable.
• But I think if any song can touch the heart, then one should value it.
• Why take drugs specifically designed to send you insane?

Sebastian Faulks Famous Quotes And Sayings

Memory is the only thing that binds you to earlier selves; for the rest, you become an entirely different being every decade or so, sloughing off the old persona, renewing and moving on. You are not who you were, he told her, nor who you will be. — Sebastian Faulks

And sometimes in life, I imagine, good things do happen. Most of the time, it's the opposite, obviously. But I don't think you should rule out the possibility that just occasionally chance might deal you a good card. — Sebastian Faulks

There arent many great passages written about food, but I love one by George Millar, who worked for the SOE in the second world war and wrote a book called Horned Pigeon. He had been on the run and hadnt eaten for a week, and his description of the cheese fondue he smells in the peasant kitchen of a house in eastern France is unbelievable. — Sebastian Faulks

I want to be careful not to throw all this away. This is happiness. I think this is what happiness is. I haven't got it yet, but I can sense it out there. I feel I'm close to it. Some days, I'm so close I can almost smell it. — Sebastian Faulks

Knowing one was comprised of recycled matter only and that selfhood was a delusion did not take away the aching of the heart. — Sebastian Faulks

I breathed and breathed and did feel some calmness enter in, though it was, as always, shot with a sense of loss. Loss and fear. — Sebastian Faulks

I don't think you ever understand your life - not till it's finished and probably not then either. The more I live the less I seem to understand. — Sebastian Faulks

Some crime against nature is about to be committed. I feel it in my veins. These men and boys are grocers and clerks, gardeners and fathers - fathers of small children. A country cannot bear to lose them. — Sebastian Faulks

I suppose that each of us may have a great moment in our life, a month, a week a year, when we are most fully what we are meant to be — Sebastian Faulks

He wrote one more paragraph for his own sake, to see what he had to say. — Sebastian Faulks

Oh, the sweetness of giving in, of full surrender. — Sebastian Faulks

You put your time where your priority is. — Sebastian Faulks

My direction? Anywhere. Because one is always nearer by not keeping still. — Sebastian Faulks

I think closeness to death would be pretty exhilarating in a way, and friendship, yeh, and selflessness, a kind of selflessness, a sense of your own worthlessness, I think, is pretty exhilarating. — Sebastian Faulks

Have you ever been lonely? No, neither have I. Solitary, yes. Alone, certainly. But lonely means minding about being on your own. I've never minded about it. — Sebastian Faulks

In the 1970s, British food was beginning to get good, whereas in France it was just starting its long, sad decline. My most memorable meals, however, have been in Italy. — Sebastian Faulks

I suppose I was lucky enough to be educated at a time when teachers still thought children could handle knowledge. They trusted us. Then there came a time when they decided that because not every kid in the class could understand or remember those things they wouldn't teach them anymore because it wasn't fair on the less good ones. So they withheld knowledge. Then I suppose the next lot of teachers didn't have the knowledge to withhold. — Sebastian Faulks

They're so attached to their patterns that they've forgotten rule number one of human behavior: there are no patterns. People just do things. There's no such things as a coherent and fully integrated human personality, let alone consistent motivation. — Sebastian Faulks

That sense of happiness just out beyond my reach - I'm not sure I'd grasped that exactly, but I'd got something close to it, contentment maybe, or at least a functioning routine with regular rewards. — Sebastian Faulks

We all operate on different levels of awareness. Half the time I don't know what I'm doing. — Sebastian Faulks

My own diagnosis of my problem is a simpler one. It's that I share 50 per cent of my genome with a banana and 98 per cent with a chimpanzee. Banana's don't do psychological consistency. And the tiny part of us that's different - the special Homo sapiens bit - is faulty. It doesn't work. Sorry about that. — Sebastian Faulks

I'd never chosen to be alone, but that was the way things had turned out, and I'd grown used to it. — Sebastian Faulks

If not just the brain but the quirks that made the individual were composed of recycled matter only, it was hard to be sure where the edges of one such being ended and another person began. — Sebastian Faulks

It's better to have a malign providence than an indifferent one. — Sebastian Faulks

I am driven by a greater force than I can resist. I believe that force has its own reason and its own morality even if they may never be clear to me while I am alive — Sebastian Faulks

This is how most people live: alive, but not conscious; conscious but not aware; aware, but intermittently. — Sebastian Faulks

It was entirely silent and I tried to breathe its peace. — Sebastian Faulks

One of the hardest things about being alive is being with other people. — Sebastian Faulks

The thought of all that happiness was hard to bear. What's the point of happiness when all it does is throw the facts of dying into clear relief? — Sebastian Faulks

Lonely's like any other organism; competitive and resourceful in the struggle to perpetuate itself. — Sebastian Faulks

He saw a picture in his mind of a terrible piling up of the dead. It came from his contemplation of the church, but it had its own clarity: the row on row, the deep rotting earth hollowed out to hold them, while the efforts of the living, with all their works and wars and great buildings, were no more than the beat of a wing against the weight of time. — Sebastian Faulks

Something had been buried that was not yet dead. — Sebastian Faulks

The nicest characters in A Week in December research are, in fact, Muslims - and their religious devotion is one of the things that defines them. — Sebastian Faulks

If you have only one life, you cant altogether ignore the question: are you enjoying it? — Sebastian Faulks

Busy is good, isn't it? Busy means we're hard at it, achieving our ends or "goals." Haven't had time to stop, or look around or think. That's considered the sign of a life well lived ... Suppose, though, you're not sure that what you're doing is at all worthwhile. Suppose you blundered into it over a spoonful of lime pickle. It's easy, it pays quite well. But really it's a distraction. It stops you thinking about what you ought to be doing. — Sebastian Faulks

I have written millions of words about contemporary England - in journalism. Why don't I take it as the background for a novel? I may do one day. But the simple answer is that it does not excite the novelistic part of my brain; it does not fire it up. — Sebastian Faulks

The function of music is to liberate in the soul those feelings which normally we keep locked up in the heart. — Sebastian Faulks

Depression - that limp word for the storm of black panic and half-demented malfunction - had over the years worked itself out in Charlotte's life in a curious pattern. Its onset was often imperceptible: like an assiduous housekeeper locking up a rambling mansion, it noiselessly went about and turned off, one by one, the mind's thousand small accesses to pleasure. — Sebastian Faulks

Shakespeare drew a map of the human mind as clearly as Newton mapped the heavens. Wht is one considered science and the other fir only to be mocked with jokes about pretty girls and drury lane? — Sebastian Faulks

Our own choices might not be as good as those that are made for us. — Sebastian Faulks

There you are, sir. There's nothing more than to love and be loved. — Sebastian Faulks

The physical shock took away the pain of being. — Sebastian Faulks

Sometimes my whole life seems like a dream; occasionally I think that someone else has lived it for me. The events and the sensations, the stories and the things that make me what I am in the eyes of other people, the list of facts that make my life ... They could be mine, they might be yours. — Sebastian Faulks

One thing about London is that when you step out into the night, it swallows you. — Sebastian Faulks

If at the one moment in your life when the chance of something transcendental is offered to you, if you have this chance to move beyond the surface of things, to understand - and you say, No, maybe not... What then? How do you explain the rest of your life to yourself? How do you pass the time until you die? Do you substitute for that an interest in what - eating? Do you spend the next sixty years trying to be fascinated by the act of breathing? — Sebastian Faulks

This intimacy is not necessary; no one is compelling me to open my inmost self and lay it naked, undefended, against that of another – merely for the joy of the communion. — Sebastian Faulks

People never explain to you exactly what they think and feel and how their thoughts and feelings work, do they? They don't have time. Or the right words. But that's what books do. It's as though your daily life is a film in the cinema. It can be fun, looking at those pictures. But if you want to know what lies behind the flat screen you have to read a book. That explains it all. — Sebastian Faulks

. . . she read with undifferentiated glee . . . — Sebastian Faulks

Life Lessons by Sebastian Faulks

1. Sebastian Faulks teaches us to appreciate the small moments in life and to be present in the moment. He also encourages us to take risks and to be brave in the face of adversity. Lastly, he emphasizes the importance of forging meaningful connections with others and cherishing the relationships we have.