Sebastian Faulks Quotes

47 Sourced Quotes

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

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
If at the one moment in your life when the chance of something transcendental is offered to you, if you have this chance to move beyond the surface of things, to understand - and you say, No, maybe not... What then? How do you explain the rest of your life to yourself? How do you pass the time until you die? Do you substitute for that an interest in what - eating? Do you spend the next sixty years trying to be fascinated by the act of breathing?

Sebastian Faulks
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

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
That's what opium does to suffering: makes it of hypothetical interest only.

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

Sebastian Faulks
But I think if any song can touch the heart, then one should value it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sebastian Faulks
Lonely's like any other organism; competitive and resourceful in the struggle to perpetuate itself.

Sebastian Faulks