Home > Author > Sebastian Faulks
1 " 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 , Engleby
2 " 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. "
3 " 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? "
4 " 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. "
5 " 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. "
6 " 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 , A Week in December
7 " 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. "
8 " You put your time where your priority is. "
9 " We're not really conscious of what we're doing most of the time. "
10 " Until we can navigate in time, I'm not sure that we can prove that what happened is real. "
11 " . . . she read with undifferentiated glee . . . "
12 " 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. "
13 " I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine. "
― Sebastian Faulks , Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War
14 " It's only after the change is fully formed that you can see what's happened. "
15 " He didn’t ask himself if she was beautiful, because the physical effect of her presence made the question insignificant. "
16 " 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. "
17 " It was entirely silent and I tried to breathe its peace. "
18 " The thing about opium is that it makes pain or difficulty unimaginable. "
19 " The physical shock took away the pain of being. "
20 " A bit of the vagueness of music stops you going completely mad, I imagine. "
