Sebastian Faulks Quotes
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I'd never chosen to be alone, but that was the way things had turned out, and I'd grown used to it.
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You put your time where your priority is.
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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.
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It's better to have a malign providence than an indifferent one.
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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.
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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.
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The thing about opium is that it makes pain or difficulty unimaginable.
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Inhale and hold the evening in your lungs.
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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.
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He wrote one more paragraph for his own sake, to see what he had to say.
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That's what opium does to suffering: makes it of hypothetical interest only.
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The thunder of false modesty was deafening.
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The end-of-summer winds make people restless.
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If you have only one life, you cant altogether ignore the question: are you enjoying it?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.
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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.
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Oh, the sweetness of giving in, of full surrender.
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You can't recall someone whose name has worn away.
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Lonely's like any other organism; competitive and resourceful in the struggle to perpetuate itself.
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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.
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I don't find life unbearably grave. I find it almost intolerably frivolous.