Sebastian Faulks Quotes
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You can't recall someone whose name has worn away.
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The function of music is to liberate in the soul those feelings which normally we keep locked up in the heart.
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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 her 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 own inner world by living temporarily in someone else’s, and on the two or three occasions that she had been too upset to concentrate she had been desolate.
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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.
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The end-of-summer winds make people restless.
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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.
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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.
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He wrote one more paragraph for his own sake, to see what he had to say.
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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.
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One thing about London is that when you step out into the night, it swallows you.
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The physical shock took away the pain of being.
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Knowing one was comprised of recycled matter only and that selfhood was a delusion did not take away the aching of the heart.
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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.
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If I could eat only one thing for the rest of my life, it would be rhubarb fool, which I make with ginger and a hint of elderflower cordial.
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That's what opium does to suffering: makes it of hypothetical interest only.
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Sometimes my whole life seems like a dream; occasionally I think that someone else has lived it for me. The events and the sensations, the stories and the things that make me what I am in the eyes of other people, the list of facts that make my life ... They could be mine, they might be yours.
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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.
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Lonely's like any other organism; competitive and resourceful in the struggle to perpetuate itself.
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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?
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The best thing is the combined effect of nicotine with alcohol, greater than the sum of the two parts.
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One of the hardest things about being alive is being with other people.
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The thing about opium is that it makes pain or difficulty unimaginable.
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Our own choices might not be as good as those that are made for us.
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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.
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Inhale and hold the evening in your lungs.
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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.
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I don't like being rumbled, I like to be invisible.
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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.
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It's better to have a malign providence than an indifferent one.
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The past was suddenly rushing in on me in a way I found hard to fight.
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