Quotes from Michel Faber

Isn't Heaven reward enough, without needing to see the damned punished?

Most distracting of all, though, was not the threat of danger but the allure of beauty.

Being apart was wrong. Simply lying side by side did more for a relationship than words. A warm bed, a nest of animal intimacy. Words could be misunderstood, whereas loving companionship bred trust.

Peter..." She let her head fall back against the seat and sighed. "Let's not go there." "That's what people always say about places where they already are.

Peter was struck by the scar's essential nature: it was not a disfigurement, it was a miracle. All the scars ever suffered by anyone in the whole of human history were not suffering but triumph: triumph against decay, triumph against death.

These days, the bigger the company, the less you can figure out what it does.

Because human beings suffer so much more than ducks." "You might not think so if you were a duck.

But miracles are not for the asking; they come only when the stern eyes of God droop shut for a moment, and Our Lady takes advantage of His inattention to grant an illicit mercy. God...is an Anglican, whereas Our Lady is of the True Faith; the two of Them have an uneasy relationship, unable to agree on anything, except that if They divorce, the Devil will leap gleefully into the breach.

The word troubled her, though. 'Indispensable.' It was a word people tended to resort to when dispensability was in the air.

I just wish," she said, "that this magnificent, stupendous God of yours could give a fuck.

Yes, seven years old she was, when she finally plucked up the courage to ask her mother what Christmas was all about, and Mrs Castaway replied (once only, after which the subject was forever forbidden): 'It's the day Jesus Christ died for our sins. Evidently unsuccessfully, since we're still paying for them.

she and they were all the same under the skin, weren't they?

She holds her head as high as if she were beautiful, and holds her body as if she were strong.

Sunlight is bad,' he wheezes. 'It's the exact same stuff as breeds maggots in wounded soldiers' legs. And when there's no war on, it fades wallpaper.

Nowadays, her life is more like a newspaper: aimless, up-to-date and full of meaningless events

The past was dwindling, like something shrinking to a speck in the rear-view mirror, and the future was shining through the windscreen, demanding her full attention.

A truly modern man, William Rackham is what might be called a superstitious atheist Christian; that is, he believes in a God who, while He may no longer be responsible for the sun rising, the saving of the Queen or the provision of daily bread, is still the prime suspect when anything goes wrong.

In the end, though, vodsels couldn't do any of the things that really defined a human being. They couldn't siuwil, the couldn't mesnishtil,they had no concept of slan.