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.

Inhale and hold the evening in your lungs.

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

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.

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

Sometimes my whole life seems like a dream; occasionally I think that someone else has lived it for me. The events and the sensations, the stories and the things that make me what I am in the eyes of other people, the list of facts that make my life ... They could be mine, they might be yours.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

The end-of-summer winds make people restless.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

If at the one moment in your life when the chance of something transcendental is offered to you, if you have this chance to move beyond the surface of things, to understand - and you say, No, maybe not... What then? How do you explain the rest of your life to yourself? How do you pass the time until you die? Do you substitute for that an interest in what - eating? Do you spend the next sixty years trying to be fascinated by the act of breathing?

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.

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

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