Top 101 Quotes & Sayings by Sebastian Faulks - Page 2

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.

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

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.

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

It was too difficult. People weren't prepared to put in the hours on the donkey work - you know, dates and facts and so on. I think in retrospect my generation will be seen as a turning point. From now on there'll be a net loss of knowledge in Europe. The difference between a peasant community in fourteenth-century Iran and modern London, though, is that if with their meager resources the villagers occasionally slipped backward, it was not for lack of trying. But with us, here in England, it was a positive choice. We chose to know less.

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.

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

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

As he rounded the corner, he saw two dozen men, naked to the waist, digging a hole thirty yards square at the side of the path. For a moment he was baffled. It seemed to have no agricultural purpose; there was no more planting or ploughing to be done. Then he realized what it was. They were digging a mass grave. He thought of shouting an order to about turn or at least to avert their eyes, but they were almost on it, and some of them had already seen their burial place. The songs died on their lips and the air was reclaimed by the birds.

The men loved jokes, though they had heard each one before. Jack's manner was persuasive; few of them had seen the old stories so well delivered. Jack himeself laughed a little, but he was able to see the effect his performance had on his audience. The noise of their laughter roared like the sea in his ears. He wanted it louder and louder; he wanted them to drown out the war with their laughter. If the could should loud enough, they might bring the world back to its senses; they might laugh loud enough to raise the dead.

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

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

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

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?

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.

. . . she read with undifferentiated glee . . .

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

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 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

The physical shock took away the pain of being.

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 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.

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?

Something had been buried that was not yet dead.

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

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

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

Why take drugs specifically designed to send you insane?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The thunder of false modesty was deafening.

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

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.

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.