Sebastian Faulks Quotes

The end-of-summer winds make people restless.

Inhale and hold the evening in your lungs.

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.

That's what opium does to suffering: makes it of hypothetical interest only.

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.

I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.

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.

Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.

We're deaf men working as musicians; we play the music but we can't hear it.

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.

I don't find life unbearably grave. I find it almost intolerably frivolous.

The best thing is the combined effect of nicotine with alcohol, greater than the sum of the two parts.

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.

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

I never for a moment considered killing myself, because it wouldn't have achieved anything.

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.

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.

The thunder of false modesty was deafening.

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.

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

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

Oh, the sweetness of giving in, of full surrender.

You put your time where your priority is.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

This is how most people live: alive, but not conscious;

conscious but not aware; aware, but intermittently.

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

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

I don't like being rumbled, I like to be invisible.

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?

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

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.

The past was suddenly rushing in on me in a way I found hard to fight.

A bit of the vagueness of music stops you going completely mad, I imagine.

Something had been buried that was not yet dead.

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.

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

It's only after the change is fully formed that you can see what's happened.