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Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War QUOTES

Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War QUOTES

1 " 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

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

― Sebastian Faulks , Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War

3 " 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 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 , Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War

4 " Currents 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 , Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War

5 " The function of music is to liberate in the soul those feelings which normally we keep locked up in the heart. "

― Sebastian Faulks , Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War

6 " Something had been buried that was not yet dead. "

― Sebastian Faulks , Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War

7 " This is not a war, this is a test of how far man can be degraded "

― Sebastian Faulks , Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War

8 " Our own choices might not be as good as those that are made for us. "

― Sebastian Faulks , Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War

9 " There is nothing more sir, than to love and be loved. "

― Sebastian Faulks , Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War

10 " He wrote one more paragraph for his own sake, to see what he had to say. "

― Sebastian Faulks , Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War

11 " But you must live your own life eventually. You have one chance only. "

― Sebastian Faulks , Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War

12 " The men loved jokes, though they had heard each one before. Jack's manner was persuasive; few of them had seen the old stories so well delivered. Jack himeself laughed a little, but he was able to see the effect his performance had on his audience. The noise of their laughter roared like the sea in his ears. He wanted it louder and louder; he wanted them to drown out the war with their laughter. If the could should loud enough, they might bring the world back to its senses; they might laugh loud enough to raise the dead. "

― Sebastian Faulks , Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War

13 " But I think if any song can touch the heart, then one should value it. "

― Sebastian Faulks , Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War

14 " He saw a picture in his mind of a terrible piling up of the dead. It came from his contemplation of the church, but it had its own clarity: the row on row, the deep rotting earth hollowed out to hold them, while the efforts of the living, with all their works and wars and great buildings, were no more than the beat of a wing against the weight of time. "

― Sebastian Faulks , Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War

15 " Gray stood up and came round the desk. "Think of the words on that memorial, Wraysford. Think of those stinking towns and foul bloody villages whose names will be turned into some bogus glory by fat-arsed historians who have sat in London. We were there. As our punishment for God knows what, we were there, and our men died in each of those disgusting places. I hate their names. I hate the sound of them and the thought of them, which is why I will not bring myself to remind you. But listen." He put his face close to Stephen's. "There are four words they will chisel beneath them at the bottom. Four words that people will look at one day. When they read the other words they will want to vomit. When they read these, they will bow their heads, just a little. 'Final advance and pursuit.' Don't tell me you don't want to put your name to those words. "

― Sebastian Faulks , Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War

16 " As he rounded the corner, he saw two dozen men, naked to the waist, digging a hole thirty yards square at the side of the path. For a moment he was baffled. It seemed to have no agricultural purpose; there was no more planting or ploughing to be done. Then he realized what it was. They were digging a mass grave. He thought of shouting an order to about turn or at least to avert their eyes, but they were almost on it, and some of them had already seen their burial place. The songs died on their lips and the air was reclaimed by the birds. "

― Sebastian Faulks , Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War

17 " Names came patterning 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 moans would come in the afternoon behind closed doors; and the places that had borne them, which would be like nunneries, like dead towns without their life or purpose, without young men at the factories or in the fields, with no husbands for the women, no deep sound of voices in the inns, with the children who would have been born, who would have grown and worked or painted, even governed, left ungenerated in their fathers shattered flesh that lay in stinking shellholes in the beet crop soil, leaving their homes to put up only granite slabs in place of living flesh, on whose inhuman surface the moss and lichen would cast their crawling green indifference. "

― Sebastian Faulks , Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War

18 " I don’t know your life history, but I think children need to believe in powers outside themselves. That’s why they read books about witches and wizards and God knows what. There is a human need for that which childhood normally exhausts. But if a child’s world is broken up by too much reality, that need goes underground. "

― Sebastian Faulks , Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War

19 " 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 there was still horror. "

― Sebastian Faulks , Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War

20 " Weir heard something different in the sounds. Once, during a period of calm, he sat on the firestep waiting for Stephen to return from an inspection and listened to the music of the tins. The empty ones were sonorous, the fuller ones provided an ascending scale. Those filled to the brim produced only a fat percussive beat unless they overbalanced, when the cascade would give a loud variation. Within earshot there were scores of tins in different states of fullness and with varying resonance. Then he heard the wire moving in the wind. It set up a moaning background noise that would occasionally gust into prominence, then lapse again to mere accompaniment. He had to work hard to discern, or perhaps imagine, a melody in this tin music, but it was better in his ears than the awful sound of shellfire. "

― Sebastian Faulks , Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War