01UndatedAll 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 / quote ↗
02UndatedDepression - 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 / quote ↗
04Undated[“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 / quote ↗
05UndatedLevade 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 / quote ↗
06UndatedCurrents 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 / quote ↗
07UndatedHeisenberg 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 mattSebastian Faulks / quote ↗
08UndatedThe past was suddenly rushing in on me in a way I found hard to fight.Sebastian Faulks / quote ↗
09UndatedI never for a moment considered killing myself, because it wouldn't have achieved anything.Sebastian Faulks / quote ↗
10UndatedWith 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 / quote ↗
12UndatedUntil 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 / quote ↗
13UndatedWe all operate on different levels of awareness. Half the time I don't know what I'm doing.Sebastian Faulks / quote ↗
14UndatedI'd never chosen to be alone, but that was the way things had turned out, and I'd grown used to it.Sebastian Faulks / quote ↗
15UndatedHave 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 / quote ↗
16UndatedOne thing about London is that when you step out into the night, it swallows you.Sebastian Faulks / quote ↗
17UndatedHe tried to sleep, but his head was filled with the faces of lunatics, their palsied hands, their shattered eyes.Sebastian Faulks / quote ↗
18UndatedPeople wonder why you choose certain subjects to write about. The truth is: you don't really. They choose youSebastian Faulks / quote ↗
19UndatedThere is an arch supported by four vast columns. Etched over hundreds and hundreds of yards of stone, furlongs of stone, there are names: "Who are these, these? The men who died in this battle?""No. The lost, the ones they did not find. The others are in the cemeteries.""These are just the ... the unfound." When she could speak again. From the whole war?"The man shook his head. "Just these fields."Elizabeth sat on the steps. "No one told me. My God no one told me,Sebastian Faulks / quote ↗
21UndatedGradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.Sebastian Faulks / quote ↗
22UndatedThe best thing is the combined effect of nicotine with alcohol, greater than the sum of the two parts.Sebastian Faulks / quote ↗
