Sebastian Faulks Quotes
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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.
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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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Oh, the sweetness of giving in, of full surrender.
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The past was suddenly rushing in on me in a way I found hard to fight.
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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.
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The best thing is the combined effect of nicotine with alcohol, greater than the sum of the two parts.
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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
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I don't find life unbearably grave. I find it almost intolerably frivolous.
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But I think if any song can touch the heart, then one should value it.
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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.
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We're deaf men working as musicians; we play the music but we can't hear it.
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My direction? Anywhere. Because one is always nearer by not keeping still.
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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.
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The physical shock took away the pain of being.
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A bit of the vagueness of music stops you going completely mad, I imagine.
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Some crime against nature is about to be committed. I feel it in my veins. These men and boys are grocers and clerks, gardeners and fathers - fathers of small children. A country cannot bear to lose them.
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We all operate on different levels of awareness. Half the time I don't know what I'm doing.
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Busy is good, isn't it? Busy means we're hard at it, achieving our ends or "goals." Haven't had time to stop, or look around or think. That's considered the sign of a life well lived ... Suppose, though, you're not sure that what you're doing is at all worthwhile. Suppose you blundered into it over a spoonful of lime pickle. It's easy, it pays quite well. But really it's a distraction. It stops you thinking about what you ought to be doing.
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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.
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I never for a moment considered killing myself, because it wouldn't have achieved anything.
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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?
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It was entirely silent and I tried to breathe its peace.
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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.
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Knowing one was comprised of recycled matter only and that selfhood was a delusion did not take away the aching of the heart.