Sebastian Faulks Quotes

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

A romantic is someone who believes that something is valuable even if it doesn't last. And a non-romantic is someone who says that if something doesn't endure, or can't be logically proved and pinned...

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...

A time before Flanders and Auschwitz had shown that, given the means of killing and the opportunity to use them, the species, far from being a pinnacle in creation, was actually lower on the scale tha...

Now I see my children and I know that they are figures in a lantern show, that their sense of permanence is an illusion, because all around us time is unstoppable.

The following September I started at the grammar school. This was in a red-brick building of the kind beloved by Victorian optimists. In

The thought of all that happiness was hard to bear. What's the point of happiness when all it does is throw the facts of dying into clear relief?

At such moments of extreme panic and anguish you do manage that trick with time: you are at last free from the illusion that time is linear.In panic, time stops: past, present and future exist as a si...

The thing about opium is that it makes pain or difficulty unimaginable.

I think closeness to death would be pretty exhilarating in a way, and friendship, yeh, and selflessness, a kind of selflessness, a sense of your own worthlessness, I think, is pretty exhilarating.

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.

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 disintegratio...

One thing about London is that when you step out into the night, it swallows you.

How grand, to be a Doctor of whatever and to weigh up and decide people's future.

Names came pattering into the dusk, bodying out the places of their forebears, the villages and towns where the telegrams would be delivered, the houses where the blinds would be drawn, where low moan...

The best thing is the combined effect of nicotine with alcohol, greater than the sum of the two parts.

Stephen watched the packets of lives with their memories and loves go spinning and vomiting into the ground. Death had no meaning, but still the numbers of them went on and on and in that new infinity...

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.

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:...

Time makes us pointless.