Sebastian Faulks Quotes

You put your time where your priority is.

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.

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.

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

The end-of-summer winds make people restless.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

But I think if any song can touch the heart, then one should value it.

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

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.

Something had been buried that was not yet dead.

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

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

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.

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?

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

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.

I think I have fallen in love and I believe the woman in question, though she has not said so, returns my feelings. How can I be sure when she has said nothing? Is this youthful vanity? I wish in some ways that it were. But I am so convinced that I barely need question myself. This conviction brings me no joy.[…]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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

The thunder of false modesty was deafening.

All my life I had lived on the presumption that there was no existence beyond... flesh, the moment of being alive... then nothing. I had searched in superstition... But there was nothing. Then I heard the sound of my own life leaving me. It was so... tender. I regretted that I had paid it no attention. Then I believed in the wisdom of what other men had found before me... I saw that those simple things might be true... I never wanted to believe in them because it was better to fight my own battle. You can believe in something without compromising the burden of your own existence.

You can't recall someone whose name has worn away.

The thing about opium is that it makes pain or difficulty unimaginable.

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

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