Sebastian Faulks Quotes

You put your time where your priority is.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why take drugs specifically designed to send you insane?

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?

. . . she read with undifferentiated glee . . .

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The physical shock took away the pain of being.

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

Something had been buried that was not yet dead.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

The thunder of false modesty was deafening.

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

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

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