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Human Traces QUOTES

Human Traces QUOTES

1 " [“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 , Human Traces

2 " He tried to sleep, but his head was filled with the faces of lunatics, their palsied hands, their shattered eyes. "

― Sebastian Faulks , Human Traces

3 " So the Bible is not so sad in the end?’ ‘Yes, it is the saddest book in the world. We are asked to believe that God has played an infantile trick on us: he has made himself unobservable, as an eternal test of “faith”. What I read, though, is the story of a species cursed by gifts and delusions that it cannot understand. I read of exile, abandonment and the terrible grief of beings who have lost something real – not of a people being put to a childish test, but of those who have lost their guide and parent, friend and only governing instructor and are left to wander in the silent darkness for all eternity. Imagine. And that is why all religion is about absence. Because once, the gods were there. And that is why all poetry and music strike us with this awful longing for what once was ours – because it begins in regions of the brain where once the gods made themselves heard. "

― Sebastian Faulks , Human Traces

4 " bulwark "

― Sebastian Faulks , Human Traces

5 " happiness creeps up on you, does it not? You never see it arrive, but one day you hesitate and you are aware that there is something... additional "

― Sebastian Faulks , Human Traces

6 " We have lived too closely, been through too much. I will not leave you. I cannot, any more than I can leave myself. "

― Sebastian Faulks , Human Traces

7 " One day, when you are grown up, you suddenly become aware that something has gone "

― Sebastian Faulks , Human Traces

8 " Which of us can deny that at some level we are afflicted by a sense that our human lives are incomplete and that there lies, just beyond the reach of our perceptions, a paradise that once was ours? "

― Sebastian Faulks , Human Traces

9 " Psychosis, ladies and gentlemen, is the price we pay for being what we are.
And how unfair, how bitterly unfair it is that the price is not shared around but paid by one man in a hundred for the other ninety-nine. "

― Sebastian Faulks , Human Traces

10 " the blade and began, very carefully, to make a shallow incision in the neck of a frog he had pinned, through its splayed feet, to the untreated wood. "

― Sebastian Faulks , Human Traces

11 " One last note on this illness. I said that it was terrible, yet that in some ways very little seemed to be wrong. Imagine a ship leaving West Africa for the New World. If the compass was set only one degree out – just one tiny degree out of three hundred and sixty – it could end up not in New York but in Mexico. That is what I mean by a tiny flaw and a catastrophic result. "

― Sebastian Faulks , Human Traces

12 " paragon; "

― Sebastian Faulks , Human Traces

13 " probang, "

― Sebastian Faulks , Human Traces

14 " He thought of the sands at Deauville and he felt weary, as though he had heard the first call of middle-age, inviting him to subside into comfortable self-mockery, recognise the embrace of defeat and to indulge his own – after all, only human – failings. "

― Sebastian Faulks , Human Traces

15 " The truer urge she had was to provide for him what his life had lacked; there was an area of experience, of laughter and domestic pleasure, which was apparently unknown to him; and the shape of that absence seemed to be the shape of her own self. "

― Sebastian Faulks , Human Traces

16 " catafalque, "

― Sebastian Faulks , Human Traces