The voices / 54 fragments

Sebastian Faulks

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01Undated

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 / quote

02Undated

That sense of happiness just out beyond my reach - I'm not sure I'd grasped that exactly, but I'd got something close to it, contentment maybe, or at least a functioning routine with regular rewards.

Sebastian Faulks / quote

03Undated

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?

Sebastian Faulks / quote

04Undated

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 / quote

05Undated

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 / quote

06Undated

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 / quote

07Undated

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 / quote

08Undated

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 / quote

09Undated

You put your time where your priority is.

Sebastian Faulks / quote

10Undated

We're not really conscious of what we're doing most of the time.

Sebastian Faulks / quote

11Undated

Until we can navigate in time, I'm not sure that we can prove that what happened is real.

Sebastian Faulks / quote

12Undated

. . . she read with undifferentiated glee . . .

Sebastian Faulks / quote

13Undated

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 / quote

14Undated

I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.

Sebastian Faulks / quote

15Undated

It's only after the change is fully formed that you can see what's happened.

Sebastian Faulks / quote

16Undated

He didn’t ask himself if she was beautiful, because the physical effect of her presence made the question insignificant.

Sebastian Faulks / quote

17Undated

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 / quote

18Undated

It was entirely silent and I tried to breathe its peace.

Sebastian Faulks / quote

19Undated

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

Sebastian Faulks / quote

20Undated

The physical shock took away the pain of being.

Sebastian Faulks / quote

21Undated

A bit of the vagueness of music stops you going completely mad, I imagine.

Sebastian Faulks / quote

22Undated

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 / quote

23Undated

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 / quote

24Undated

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

Sebastian Faulks / quote