Sebastian Faulks Quotes

I want to be careful not to throw all this away. This is happiness. I think this is what happiness is. I haven't got it yet, but I can sense it out there. I feel I'm close to it. Some days, I'm so close I can almost smell it.

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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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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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There was a pretty young woman I used to see pegging out sheets and I worried that she would grow old there and that no one would know how beautiful she was. And maybe she would die without ever having really lived.

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I looked at him on the bed. He coughed once and a trail of brownish dead blood came out of his mouth and ran down the side of his chin. Then he stopped breathing. And I thought, I'll make sure I never end up here, either.

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. . . she read with undifferentiated glee . . .

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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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You put your time where your priority is.

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We're not really conscious of what we're doing most of the time.

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Time makes us pointless.

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Until we can navigate in time, I'm not sure that we can prove that what happened is real.

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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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All reality about me now appeared to be in tatters, taken down and reduced to the civil war of its particles. I held on very, very tight indeed.

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

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This is not a war, this is a test of how far man can be degraded

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And in that history you're trying to connect to something that once was yours - to something purer, better, something that you lost or something, maybe, that you never knew but that you feel you knew.

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The physical shock took away the pain of being.

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The thing about opium is that it makes pain or difficulty unimaginable.

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

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

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

2001

How grand, to be a Doctor of whatever and to weigh up and decide people's future.

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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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