Sebastian Faulks Quotes
-
I'd never chosen to be alone, but that was the way things had turned out, and I'd grown used to it.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
You put your time where your priority is.
-
It's better to have a malign providence than an indifferent one.
-
Inhale and hold the evening in your lungs.
-
If you have only one life, you cant altogether ignore the question: are you enjoying it?
-
The thing about opium is that it makes pain or difficulty unimaginable.
-
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.
-
That's what opium does to suffering: makes it of hypothetical interest only.
-
He wrote one more paragraph for his own sake, to see what he had to say.
-
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.
-
. . . she read with undifferentiated glee . . .
-
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.
-
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.
-
Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.
-
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.
-
The end-of-summer winds make people restless.
-
The thunder of false modesty was deafening.
-
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.
-
You can't recall someone whose name has worn away.
-
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.
-
And sometimes in life, I imagine, good things do happen. Most of the time, it's the opposite, obviously. But I don't think you should rule out the possibility that just occasionally chance might deal you a good card.