|
de85b86
|
A bit of the vagueness of music stops you going completely mad, I imagine.
|
|
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
f6abdc2
|
I never for a moment considered killing myself, because it wouldn't have achieved anything.
|
|
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
6394fa3
|
All reality about me now appeared to be in tatters, taken down and reduced to the civil war of its particles. I held on very, very tight indeed. Because in addition to that feeling, that disintegration, there was rage. I wanted to break something.
|
|
rage
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
a99f453
|
I wonder what it's like to be dead.
|
|
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
20b5725
|
The thunder of false modesty was deafening.
|
|
thunder
modesty
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
05d24fd
|
It's only after the change is fully formed that you can see what's happened.
|
|
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
2959c25
|
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.
|
|
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
95a2551
|
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 |
|
e7da1d5
|
He didn't ask himself if she was beautiful, because the physical effect of her presence made the question insignificant.
|
|
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
9683fd0
|
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.
|
|
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
bfd1ea2
|
I've met men I would trust in the mouth of hell. Byrne or Douglas. I would trust them to breathe for me, to pump my blood with their hearts." "Did you love them best? Would they be the ones you'd choose?" "To die with? No. The one time I've felt what you describe was with a woman." "A lover, you mean?" said Jack. "Not your own flesh and blood?" "I think she was my own flesh and blood. I truly believe she was."
|
|
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
ecbfd0b
|
It seemed to Jack that if an ordinary human being, his own son, no one particular, could have this purity of mind, then perhaps the isolated deeds of virtue at which people marveled in later life were not really isolated at all; perhaps they were the natural continuation of the innocent goodness that all people brought into the world at their birth. If this was true, then his fellow-human beings were not the rough, flawed creatures that mos..
|
|
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
646d55c
|
Grief is a peculiar emotion.
|
|
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
1492977
|
She was so beautiful I had to move away.
|
|
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
f458230
|
I don't like being rumbled, I like to be invisible.
|
|
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
aea19ba
|
There 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 to..
|
|
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
3ae5809
|
The past was suddenly rushing in on me in a way I found hard to fight.
|
|
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
ddb1b08
|
It's better to have a malign providence than an indifferent one.
|
|
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
ab62d14
|
The best thing is the combined effect of nicotine with alcohol, greater than the sum of the two parts.
|
|
nicotine
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
dbef91a
|
That's what opium does to suffering: makes it of hypothetical interest only.
|
|
opium
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
c86b20a
|
We're not really conscious of what we're doing most of the time.
|
|
time
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
8a4dfe0
|
You can't recall someone whose name has worn away.
|
|
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
930a8af
|
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.
|
|
loss
fear
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
b17ad90
|
That night Christine Hartmann went to bed with a book she had taken from among the many that lay strewn around the Manor. From an early age she had developed the art of being alone and generally preferred her own company to anyone else's. She read books at enormous speed and judged them entirely on their ability to remove her from her material surroundings. In almost all the unhappiest days of her life she had been able to escape from her o..
|
|
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
32967af
|
I don't find life unbearably grave. I find it almost intolerably frivolous.
|
|
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
e485693
|
But I can hardly remember what it felt like. It's like everything that happens to you. It doesn't feel real.
|
|
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
8cc9e3a
|
I felt trapped in a world that I couldn't mould to my own desires. Others were in sunlight; I was in darkness.
|
|
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
eaee9c9
|
Knowing one was comprised of recycled matter only and that selfhood was a delusion did not take away the aching of the heart.
|
|
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
9f2999f
|
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 |
|
30b8fc1
|
I'd become more adept at being with other people; I'd lowered my expectations of them and learned to let my mind drift into neutral when they spoke.
|
|
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
ed9d76a
|
As she made coffee in the kitchen and tried to spoon the frozen ice-cream from its carton without snapping the shaft off the spoon, Elizabeth was struck, not for the first time, by the thought that her life was entirely frivolous. It was a rush and slither of trivial crises; of uncertain cash-flow, small triumphs, occasional sex and too many cigarettes; of missed deadlines that turned out not to matter; of arguments, new clothes, bursts of ..
|
|
life
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
adfa1f3
|
There had always seemed to me a frightening amount of chance in the way that people chose their careers.
|
|
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
cc1d0ef
|
His own men, those who would attack in the morning, knelt on the earth, faces hidden behind one hand, in an agonizing tunnel of their own, a darkness where there was no time but where they tried to look on death.
|
|
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
d02a8de
|
They saw the Scots coming up out of their burrows like raving women in their skirts, dying in ripples across the yellowish-brown soil. They saw the steady tread of the Hampshire's as though they had willingly embarked on a slow-motion dance from which they were content not to return. They saw men from every corner walking, powerless, into an engulfing storm.
|
|
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
9299c91
|
If only I could have my time again.
|
|
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
1647003
|
Heisenberg 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 matter on? When you ask a question that you'd actually like to know the answer to--what was there bef..
|
|
voles
meaning
science
questions
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
fa09791
|
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.
|
|
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
41bc28e
|
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?
|
|
happiness
relief
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
95c0997
|
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.
|
|
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
3b49606
|
The Red Lion was a four-ale bar with a handful of lowbrowed sons of toil who looked as though they might be related to one another in ways frowned on by the Old Testament.
|
|
rude-mechanicals
humor
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
648b37b
|
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.
|
|
death
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
85b7d10
|
How grand, to be a Doctor of whatever and to weigh up and decide people's future.
|
|
future
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
a77aa7e
|
The more you're challenged, the more rigidly you assert your beliefs. You have nothing to lose because without your beliefs you're nothing anyway: they make you what you are. It's shit or bust.
|
|
|
Sebastian Faulks |
|
6f9976b
|
The more I heard, the less I knew.
|
|
|
Sebastian Faulks |