Sebastian Faulks Quotes

47 Sourced Quotes

If you have only one life you can't altogether ignore the question: are you enjoying it?

Sebastian Faulks
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.

Sebastian Faulks
He saw a picture in his mind of a terrible piling up of the dead. It came from his contemplation of the church, but it had its own clarity: the row on row, the deep rotting earth hollowed out to hold them, while the efforts of the living, with all their works and wars and great buildings, were no more than the beat of a wing against the weight of time.

Sebastian Faulks
I suppose it was a dream that lasted really about fifty years. By the time universal education had begun to work properly, say 1925, and the time the first teachers started to hold back information, say 1975. So a fifty-year dream.

Sebastian Faulks
Sometimes my whole life seems like a dream; occasionally I think that someone else has lived it for me. The events and the sensations, the stories and the things that make me what I am in the eyes of other people, the list of facts that make my life... They could be mine, they might be yours.

Sebastian Faulks
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.

Sebastian Faulks
I'd never chosen to be alone, but that was the way things had turned out, and I'd grown used to it.

Sebastian Faulks
The function of music is to liberate in the soul those feelings which normally we keep locked up in the heart.

Sebastian Faulks
The best thing is the combined effect of nicotine with alcohol, greater than the sum of the two parts.

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

Sebastian Faulks
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.

Sebastian Faulks
I suppose I was lucky enough to be educated at a time when teachers still thought children could handle knowledge. They trusted us. Then there came a time when they decided that because not every kid in the class could understand or remember those things they wouldn't teach them anymore because it wasn't fair on the less good ones. So they withheld knowledge. Then I suppose the next lot of teachers didn't have the knowledge to withhold.

Sebastian Faulks
I don't find life unbearably grave. I find it almost intolerably frivolous.

Sebastian Faulks
Depression—though that seemed a 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.

Sebastian Faulks
I never for a moment considered killing myself, because it wouldn't have achieved anything.

Sebastian Faulks
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.

Sebastian Faulks
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.

Sebastian Faulks
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.

Sebastian Faulks
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.

Sebastian Faulks
The past was suddenly rushing in on me in a way I found hard to fight.

Sebastian Faulks
This is how most people live: alive, but not conscious; conscious but not aware; aware, but intermittently.

Sebastian Faulks
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?

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

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

Sebastian Faulks
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.

Sebastian Faulks
I suppose that each of us may have a great moment in our life, a month, a week a year, when we are most fully what we are meant to be

Sebastian Faulks
It's better to have a malign providence than an indifferent one.

Sebastian Faulks
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.

Sebastian Faulks
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.

Sebastian Faulks
We all operate on different levels of awareness. Half the time I don't know what I'm doing.

Sebastian Faulks