Sebastian Faulks Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

From an early age she had developed the art of being alone and generally preferred her own company to anyone else’s. She read books at enormous speed and judged them entirely on her ability to remove her from her material surroundings. In almost all the unhappiest days of her life she had been able to escape from her own inner world by living temporarily in someone else’s, and on the two or three occasions that she had been too upset to concentrate she had been desolate.

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.

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

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.

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.

You put your time where your priority is.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

The physical shock took away the pain of being.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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