Quotes from Michel Faber

to her, all familiar responses smell of entrapment. Sharing an old joke, singing an old song - these are admissions of defeat, of being satisfied with one's lot. In the sky, the Fates are watching, and when they hear such things, they murmur amongst themselves: Ah yes, that one is quite content as she is; changing her lot would only confuse her.

God damn God and all His horrible filthy Creation.

Reassurance is such a sad, mad thing. Deep inside, everyone knows the truth.

The variety of shapes, colours and textures under her feet was, she believed, literally infinite. It must be. Each shell, each pebble, each stone had been made what it was by aeons of submarine or subglacial massage. The indiscriminate, eternal devotion of nature to its numberless particles had an emotional importance for Isserley; it put the unfairness of human life into perspective.

Few know what year it is, or even that eighteen and a half centuries are supposed to have passed since a Jewish troublemaker was hauled away to the gallows for disturbing the peace

They both sat in silence for the rest of the journey, as if conscious of having let each other down.

Nothing happened, and time stubbornly refused to pass.

It was such an infantile prayer, the sort of prayer a five-year-old might pray. But maybe those were the best kind.

That was the sort of thing crazy people did—instinctively choosing the experiences that confirmed their own negative attitudes.

Needs could not bully her.

Why was even the shallowest human conversation so fraught with pitfalls and tricky calibrations? Why couldn't people just keep silent until they had something essential to say, like the Oasans?

Grainger looked exasperated. "Why don't you just come straight out and use the word aliens ? "Because we're the aliens here.

People and their dwellings were such a thin dust on the surface of the globe, like invisible specks of bacteria on an orange, and the feeble lights of kebab shops and supermarkets failed utterly to register on the infinities of space above.

Can't you see that? Everybody's sentimental, everybody.

if she were its leader. Not that she ever would be: she was born to be a dissenter within a larger certainty, she knows that.

You want Paradise, you gotta build it on war, on blood, on envy and naked greed.

Not for the first time, Peter thought about how much of our lives we spend sequestered inside small patches of electric brightness, blind to everything beyond the reach of those fragile bulbs.

He only wished he'd had the chance to explain more fully how prayer worked. That it wasn't a matter of asking for things and being accepted or rejected, it was a matter of adding one's energy—insignificant in itself—to the vastly greater energy that was God's love. In fact, it was an affirmation of being part of God, an aspect of His spirit temporarily housed inside a body.

Forgive me, Lord, for the smallness and selfishness of my mind. Amen.

MERCY. It was a word she'd rarely encountered

Sugar understood the permanence of being Sugar or Lotty or Lucy or whoever you might be, trapped on a square of card to be shown at will to strangers. Whatever violations she routinely submits to in the privacy of bedroom, they vanish the moment they're over, half-forgotten with the drying of sweat. But to be chemically fixed in time and passed hand to hand forever: that is a nakedness which can never be clothed again

You one of those decaffeinated Christians, padre ? The diabetic wafer? Doctrine-free, guilt-reduced, low in Last judgement, 100% less Second Coming, no added Armageddon? Might contain small traces of crucified Jew?

A simple fuck is one thing, but let a man sleep with you just once and he thinks he can bring his dog and his pigeons.

There was a red button on the wall labeled EMERGENCY, but no button labeled BEWILDERMENT.