“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
“We all operate on different levels of awareness. Half the time I don’t know what I’m doing.”
— Sebastian Faulks
“Until she had had children of her own she had not been able to contemplate the death of either of her parents; when the subject had arisen, in conversation or in her own imagining, she had said only: I just don’t know what I’d do.”
— Sebastian Faulks
“She was so beautiful I had to move away.”
— Sebastian Faulks
“With no blame there’s no shame. A human society can’t exist without shame. Shame is like handedness or walking upright. It’s a central human attribute. In fact, it’s the first human quality ever recorded.”Where?”Genesis, Chapter Three. The covering of nakedness. The acquisition of shame was the first consequence of consciousness, of the speciating moment. Take shame from me and you are calling me pre-human.”
— Sebastian Faulks
“I never for a moment considered killing myself, because it wouldn’t have achieved anything.”
— Sebastian Faulks
“The past was suddenly rushing in on me in a way I found hard to fight.”
— Sebastian Faulks
“Heisenberg and Bohr and Einstein strike me as being like gifted retriever dogs. Off they go, not just for an afternoon, but for ten years; they come back exhausted and triumphant and drop at your feet… a vole. It’s a remarkable thing in its way, a vole—intricate, beautiful really, marvellous. But does it… Does it help? Does it move the matt”
— Sebastian Faulks
“Currents of desire and excitement that she had not known or thought about for years now flooded in her. She wanted him to bring alive what she had buried, and to demean, destroy, her fabricated self.”
— Sebastian Faulks
“Levade had told her one day that there was no such thing as a coherent personality. When you are forty you have no cell in your body that you had at eighteen. It was the same, he said, with your character. 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
“[“What is the most real thing you can think of?”]Jacques thought for a long time before answering; he tried to weigh up what was most vital and enduring in all that he had known. Eventually, no longer smiling, he said, ‘Memory’.”
— Sebastian Faulks
“Grief is a peculiar emotion.”
— 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
“All my life I had lived on the presumption that there was no existence beyond… flesh, the moment of being alive… then nothing. I had searched in superstition… But there was nothing. Then I heard the sound of my own life leaving me. It was so… tender. I regretted that I had paid it no attention. Then I believed in the wisdom of what other men had found before me… I saw that those simple things might be true… I never wanted to believe in them because it was better to fight my own battle. You can believe in something without compromising the burden of your own existence.”
— Sebastian Faulks
“How grand, to be a Doctor of whatever and to weigh up and decide people’s future.”
— 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
“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.”
— Sebastian Faulks
“A bit of the vagueness of music stops you going completely mad, I imagine.”
— Sebastian Faulks
“The physical shock took away the pain of being.”
— Sebastian Faulks
“The thing about opium is that it makes pain or difficulty unimaginable.”
— Sebastian Faulks
“It was entirely silent and I tried to breathe its peace.”
— Sebastian Faulks
“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.”
— Sebastian Faulks
“He didn’t ask himself if she was beautiful, because the physical effect of her presence made the question insignificant.”
— Sebastian Faulks
“It’s only after the change is fully formed that you can see what’s happened.”
— Sebastian Faulks
“I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.”
— 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
“. . . she read with undifferentiated glee . . .”
— 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