Sebastian Faulks Quotes

47 Sourced Quotes

One of the hardest things about being alive is being with other people.

Sebastian Faulks
He wrote one more paragraph for his own sake, to see what he had to say.

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
I don't think you ever understand your life - not till it's finished and probably not then either. The more I live the less I seem to understand.

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

Sebastian Faulks
Reading a Penelope Fitzgerald novel is like being taken for a ride in a peculiar kind of car. Everything is of top quality — the engine, the coachwork, and the interior all fill you with confidence. Then, after a mile or so, someone throws the steering-wheel out of the window.

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

Sebastian Faulks
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.

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
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.

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

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

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
We're deaf men working as musicians; we play the music but we can't hear it.

Sebastian Faulks
Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.

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

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
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
My direction? Anywhere. Because one is always nearer by not keeping still.

Sebastian Faulks