Sebastian Faulks
If at the one moment in your life when the chance of something transcendental is offered to you, if you have this chance to move beyond the surface of things, to understand - and you say, No, maybe not... What then? How do you explain the rest of your life to yourself? How do you pass the time until you die? Do you substitute for that an interest in what - eating? Do you spend the next sixty years trying to be fascinated by the act of breathing?Collection: Moving
They're so attached to their patterns that they've forgotten rule number one of human behavior: there are no patterns. People just do things. There's no such things as a coherent and fully integrated human personality, let alone consistent motivation.Collection: Motivation
I don't find life unbearably grave. I find it almost intolerably frivolous.Collection: Graves
I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.Collection: Reflection
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.Collection: War
Some crime against nature is about to be committed. I feel it in my veins. These men and boys are grocers and clerks, gardeners and fathers - fathers of small children. A country cannot bear to lose them.Collection: Country
The best thing is the combined effect of nicotine with alcohol, greater than the sum of the two parts.Collection: Two
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.Collection: Song
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Believe
I'd never chosen to be alone, but that was the way things had turned out, and I'd grown used to it.Collection: Way
Busy is good, isn't it? Busy means we're hard at it, achieving our ends or "goals." Haven't had time to stop, or look around or think. That's considered the sign of a life well lived ... Suppose, though, you're not sure that what you're doing is at all worthwhile. Suppose you blundered into it over a spoonful of lime pickle. It's easy, it pays quite well. But really it's a distraction. It stops you thinking about what you ought to be doing.Collection: Mean
You can't recall someone whose name has worn away.Collection: Names
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.Collection: Laughter
I am driven by a greater force than I can resist. I believe that force has its own reason and its own morality even if they may never be clear to me while I am aliveCollection: Believe
The past was suddenly rushing in on me in a way I found hard to fight.Collection: Fighting
I never for a moment considered killing myself, because it wouldn't have achieved anything.Collection: Moments
. . . she read with undifferentiated glee . . .Collection: Glee
The thing about opium is that it makes pain or difficulty unimaginable.Collection: Pain
Why take drugs specifically designed to send you insane?Collection: Drug
One of the hardest things about being alive is being with other people.Collection: People
Depression - 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.Collection: Depression
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.Collection: Fear
I have written millions of words about contemporary England - in journalism. Why don't I take it as the background for a novel? I may do one day. But the simple answer is that it does not excite the novelistic part of my brain; it does not fire it up.Collection: Simple
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?Collection: Dying
Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.Collection: Feelings
My direction? Anywhere. Because one is always nearer by not keeping still.Collection: Stills
I suppose that each of us may have a great moment in our life, a month, a week a year, when we are most fully what we are meant to beCollection: Years
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.Collection: Thinking
The physical shock took away the pain of being.Collection: Pain
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.Collection: Contentment
He wrote one more paragraph for his own sake, to see what he had to say.Collection: Sake
Something had been buried that was not yet dead.Collection: Buried
Lonely's like any other organism; competitive and resourceful in the struggle to perpetuate itself.Collection: Lonely
It's better to have a malign providence than an indifferent one.Collection: Providence
If not just the brain but the quirks that made the individual were composed of recycled matter only, it was hard to be sure where the edges of one such being ended and another person began.Collection: Brain
But I think if any song can touch the heart, then one should value it.Collection: Song
Knowing one was comprised of recycled matter only and that selfhood was a delusion did not take away the aching of the heart.Collection: Heart
I think I have fallen in love and I believe the woman in question, though she has not said so, returns my feelings. How can I be sure when she has said nothing? Is this youthful vanity? I wish in some ways that it were. But I am so convinced that I barely need question myself. This conviction brings me no joy.[…]I am driven by a greater force than I can resist. I believe that force has its own reason and its own morality even if they may never be clear to me while I am alive.Collection: Believe
Shakespeare drew a map of the human mind as clearly as Newton mapped the heavens. Wht is one considered science and the other fir only to be mocked with jokes about pretty girls and drury lane?Collection: Girl
The nicest characters in A Week in December research are, in fact, Muslims - and their religious devotion is one of the things that defines them.Collection: Religious
If you have only one life, you cant altogether ignore the question: are you enjoying it?Collection: Enjoy
There arent many great passages written about food, but I love one by George Millar, who worked for the SOE in the second world war and wrote a book called Horned Pigeon. He had been on the run and hadnt eaten for a week, and his description of the cheese fondue he smells in the peasant kitchen of a house in eastern France is unbelievable.Collection: Running
I don't like being rumbled, I like to be invisible.Collection: Invisible
That's what opium does to suffering: makes it of hypothetical interest only.Collection: Suffering
A bit of the vagueness of music stops you going completely mad, I imagine.Collection: Mad
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.Collection: Sorry
This intimacy is not necessary; no one is compelling me to open my inmost self and lay it naked, undefended, against that of another – merely for the joy of the communion.Collection: Self
The thunder of false modesty was deafening.Collection: Modesty