Sebastian Faulks Quotes - Page 3

The physical shock took away the pain of being.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.