Sebastian Faulks > Quotes

“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.”
― Sebastian Faulks, A Week in December

“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

“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, Charlotte Gray

“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

“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, Charlotte Gray

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

“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.”
― Sebastian Faulks, The Girl at the Lion d'Or

“. . . she read with undifferentiated glee . . .”
― Sebastian Faulks, A Week in December

“That night Christine Hartmann went to bed with a book she had taken from among the many that lay strewn around the Manor. 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 their 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.”
― Sebastian Faulks, The Girl at the Lion d'Or

“My direction? Anywhere. Because one is always nearer by not keeping still.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

“Inhale and hold the evening in your lungs.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

“The men loved jokes, though they had heard each one before. Jack's manner was persuasive; few of them had seen the old stories so well delivered. Jack himeself laughed a little, but he was able to see the effect his performance had on his audience. The noise of their laughter roared like the sea in his ears. He wanted it louder and louder; he wanted them to drown out the war with their laughter. If the could should loud enough, they might bring the world back to its senses; they might laugh loud enough to raise the dead.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War

“It was entirely silent and I tried to breathe its peace.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

“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, Engleby

“Gray stood up and came round the desk. "Think of the words on that memorial, Wraysford. Think of those stinking towns and foul bloody villages whose names will be turned into some bogus glory by fat-arsed historians who have sat in London. We were there. As our punishment for God knows what, we were there, and our men died in each of those disgusting places. I hate their names. I hate the sound of them and the thought of them, which is why I will not bring myself to remind you. But listen." He put his face close to Stephen's. "There are four words they will chisel beneath them at the bottom. Four words that people will look at one day. When they read the other words they will want to vomit. When they read these, they will bow their heads, just a little. 'Final advance and pursuit.' Don't tell me you don't want to put your name to those words.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War

“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, A Week in December

“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.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

“You can't recall someone whose name has worn away.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

“We're deaf men working as musicians; we play the music but we can't hear it.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

“You put your time where your priority is.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

“It's only after the change is fully formed that you can see what's happened.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

“But I can hardly remember what it felt like. It's like everything that happens to you. It doesn't feel real.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

“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, Engleby

“I'd become more adept at being with other people; I'd lowered my expectations of them and learned to let my mind drift into neutral when they spoke.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

“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, Engleby

“One of the hardest things about being alive is being with other people.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

“The past was suddenly rushing in on me in a way I found hard to fight.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

“The thing about opium is that it makes pain or difficulty unimaginable.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

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

“That's what opium does to suffering: makes it of hypothetical interest only.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

“But it was only the twentieth century in Europe that had universal education and the belief in progress - a net gain of knowledge among all. And that's now been abandoned as a goal." "Why?" "It was too difficult. People weren't prepared to put in the hours on the donkey work - you know, dates and facts and so on. I think in retrospect my generation will be seen as a turning point. From now on there'll be a net loss of knowledge in Europe. The difference between a peasant community in fourteenth-century Iran and modern London, though, is that if with their meager resources the villagers occasionally slipped backward, it was not for lack of trying. But with us, here in England, it was a positive choice. We chose to know less.”
― Sebastian Faulks, A Week in December

“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."

"I think what's happened is that because they themselves know less than their predecessors, innovators and leaders today have remade the world in their own image. Spellchecks. Search engines. They've remodeled the world so that ignorance is not really a disadvantage. And I should think that increasingly they'll carry on reshaping the world to accommodate a net loss of knowledge.”
― Sebastian Faulks, A Week in December

“There you are, sir. There's nothing more than to love and be loved.”
― Sebastian Faulks

“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.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

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

“We're not really conscious of what we're doing most of the time.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

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

“The physical shock took away the pain of being.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

“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.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

“Oh, the sweetness of giving in, of full surrender.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

“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. Because in addition to that feeling, that disintegration, there was rage. I wanted to break something.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

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

“These are things that help me if not lose then leave behind, what else, my self.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

“He wrote one more paragraph for his own sake, to see what he had to say.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War

“How grand, to be a Doctor of whatever and to weigh up and decide people's future.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

“What a pair of frauds.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

“The end-of-summer winds make people restless.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

“He really was a prize ass.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

“I wonder what it's like to be dead.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

“Time makes us pointless.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby