Michel Faber > Quotes

“A single day spent doing things which fail to nourish the soul is a day stolen, mutilated, and discarded in the gutter of destiny.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“Participating in Society in not a thing one can do naturally; one has to rehearse for it.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“I am a fallen woman, but I assure you: I did not fall. I was pushed.”
― Michel Faber

“The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that's always been there, and the next minute it's just a memory.”
― Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things

“Most true things are kind of corny, don’t you think? But we make them more sophisticated out of sheer embarrassment.”
― Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things

“Shared suffering, she’d found, was no guarantee of intimacy.”
― Michel Faber, Under the Skin

“Some people go through the heavy stuff. They fight in wars. They're in jail. They start a business and it gets shut down by gangsters. They end up hustling their ass in a foreign country. It's one long list of setbacks and humiliations. But it doesn't touch them, not really. They're having an adventure. It's like: What's next? And then there's other people who are just trying to live quietly, they stay out of trouble, they're maybe ten years old, or fourteen, and one Friday morning at 9:35 something happens to them, something private, something that breaks their heart. Forever.”
― Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things

“History indulges strange whims in the way it dresses its women.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“Isn't Heaven reward enough, without needing to see the damned punished?”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“Why are there such long words in the world, Miss?’ enquires Sophie, when the mineralogy lesson is over.
‘One long difficult word is the same as a whole sentence full of short easy ones, Sophie,’ says Sugar. ‘It saves time and paper.’ Seeing that the child is unconvinced, she adds, ‘If books were written in such a way that every person, no matter how young, could understand everything in them, they would be enormously long books. Would you wish to read a book that was a thousand pages long, Sophie?’
Sophie answers without hesitation.
‘I would read a thousand million pages, Miss, if all the words were words I could understand.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“Most distracting of all, though, was not the threat of danger but the allure of beauty.”
― Michel Faber, Under the Skin

“Being apart was wrong. Simply lying side by side did more for a relationship than words. A warm bed, a nest of animal intimacy. Words could be misunderstood, whereas loving companionship bred trust.”
― Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things

“Peter was struck by the scar’s essential nature: it was not a disfigurement, it was a miracle. All the scars ever suffered by anyone in the whole of human history were not suffering but triumph: triumph against decay, triumph against death.”
― Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things

“These days, the bigger the company, the less you can figure out what it does.”
― Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things

“Peter...” She let her head fall back against the seat and sighed. “Let’s not go there.”
“That’s what people always say about places where they already are.”
― Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things

“Because human beings suffer so much more than ducks.”
“You might not think so if you were a duck.”
― Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things

“I just wish,” she said, “that this magnificent, stupendous God of yours could give a fuck.”
― Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things

“Sugar leans her chin against the knuckles of the hand that holds the pen. Glistening on the page between her silk-shrouded elbows lies an unfinished sentence. The heroine of her novel has just slashed the throat of a man. The problem is how, precisely, the blood will flow. Flow is too gentle a word; spill implies carelessness; spurt is out of the question because she has used the word already, in another context, a few lines earlier. Pour out implies that the man has some control over the matter, which he most emphatically doesn’t; leak is too feeble for the savagery of the injury she has inflicted upon him. Sugar closes her eyes and watches, in the lurid theatre of her mind, the blood issue from the slit neck. When Mrs Castaway’s warning bell sounds, she jerks in surprise.
Hastily, she scrutinises her bedroom. Everything is neat and tidy. All her papers are hidden away, except for this single sheet on her writing-desk.
Spew, she writes, having finally been given, by tardy Providence, the needful word.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“But miracles are not for the asking; they come only when the stern eyes of God droop shut for a moment, and Our Lady takes advantage of His inattention to grant an illicit mercy. God...is an Anglican, whereas Our Lady is of the True Faith; the two of Them have an uneasy relationship, unable to agree on anything, except that if They divorce, the Devil will leap gleefully into the breach.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“The word troubled her, though. ‘Indispensable.’ It was a word people tended to resort to when dispensability was in the air.”
― Michel Faber, Under the Skin

“Yes, seven years old she was, when she finally plucked up the courage to ask her mother what Christmas was all about, and Mrs Castaway replied (once only, after which the subject was forever forbidden): ‘It’s the day Jesus Christ died for our sins. Evidently unsuccessfully, since we’re still paying for them.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“she and they were all the same under the skin, weren’t they?”
― Michel Faber, Under the Skin

“She holds her head as high as if she were beautiful, and holds her body as if she were strong.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“Nowadays, her life is more like a newspaper: aimless, up-to-date and full of meaningless events”
― Michel Faber

“Sunlight is bad,' he wheezes. 'It's the exact same stuff as breeds maggots in wounded soldiers' legs. And when there's no war on, it fades wallpaper.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“The past was dwindling, like something shrinking to a speck in the rear-view mirror, and the future was shining through the windscreen, demanding her full attention.”
― Michel Faber, Under the Skin

“I sometimes think that the only things really worth talking about are the things people absolutely refuse to discuss.”
― Michel Faber, Under the Skin

“You know,’ Amlis went on, ‘Some water fell out of the sky not so long ago.’ His voice was a little higher than usual, vulnerable with awe. ‘It just fell out of the sky. In little droplets, thousands of them close together. I looked up to see where they were coming from. They seemed to be materializing out of nowhere. I couldn’t believe it. Then I opened my mouth to the sky. Some droplets fell straight in. It was an indescribable feeling. As if nature was actually trying to nurture me.”
― Michel Faber, Under the Skin

“A truly modern man, William Rackham is what might be called a superstitious atheist Christian; that is, he believes in a God who, while He may no longer be responsible for the sun rising, the saving of the Queen or the provision of daily bread, is still the prime suspect when anything goes wrong.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

“Falling in love: how does it work? Over the years we gather the odd clue, but nothing adds up. We’d like to think we have a picture of our future partner projected in our mind, all their qualities recorded as if on film, and we just search the planet for that person until we find them, sitting in Casablanca waiting to be recognised. But in reality our love lives are blown around by career and coincidence, not to mention lack of nerve on given occasions, and we never have respectable reasons for anything until we have to make them up afterwards for the benefit of our curious friends.”
― Michel Faber, Some Rain Must Fall: And Other Stories