Sebastian Faulks > Quotes

“I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong

“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

“The function of music is to liberate in the soul those feelings which normally we keep locked up in the heart.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong

“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

“Inhale and hold the evening in your lungs.”
― 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

“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

“Something had been buried that was not yet dead.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong

“This is not a war, this is a test of how far man can be degraded”
― Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong

“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

“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

“One thing about London is that when you step out into the night, it swallows you.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

“Our own choices might not be as good as those that are made for us.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong

“There is nothing more sir, than to love and be loved.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong

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

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

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

“But you must live your own life eventually. You have one chance only.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong

“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

“This is how most people live: alive, but not conscious; conscious but not aware; aware, but intermittently.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

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

“Some crime against nature is about to be committed. I feel it in my veins. These men and boys are grocers and clerks, gardeners and fathers - fathers of small children. A country cannot bear to lose them.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong

“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

“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

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

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

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

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

“Sometimes my whole life seems like a dream; occasionally I think that someone else has lived it for me. The events and the sensations, the stories and the things that make me what I am in the eyes of other people, the list of facts that make my life ... They could be mine, they might be yours.”
― Sebastian Faulks, A Possible Life: A Novel in Five Love Stories

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