Quotes from Michel Faber

was a female. Isserley wasn't interested in females, at least not in that way. Let them get picked up by someone else. If the hitcher was male, she usually went back for another look, unless he was an obvious weakling. Assuming he'd made a reasonable impression on her

Only the other day, Robbie had gone to a terrible disco in Alness, hoping it would transform his life in some way.

But to be chemically fixed in time and passed hand to hand forever: that is a nakedness which can never be clothed again.

La curiosidad es el nombre despectivo que los hombres dan a la sed de conocimiento que tienen las mujeres.

Peter's hands had ceased trembling. He had been granted perspective. This was not Gethsemane: he wasn't headed for Golgotha, he was embarking on a great adventure. He'd been chosen out of thousands, to pursue the most important missionary calling since the Apostles had ventured forth to conquer Rome with the power of love, and he was going to do his best.

A person who is worth nothing must introduce you to a person worth next-to-nothing, and that person to another, and so on and so forth until finally you can step across the threshold, almost one of the family.

Proof, once again, that reality was not objective, but always waiting to be reshaped and redefined by one's attitude.

oh how she wondered, what she looked like to him, in his alien innocence.

could indicate the cocky self-awareness of a male in prime condition.

Well, I did my best,' said Amlis, in a self-deprecating purr. 'But I can tell when a challenge is hopeless. Anyway, it's not your minds I need to change.' And he glanced round at the contents of the ship's hull, acknowledging the scale of the slaughter and its commercial purpose.

How's things, man?" The black man extended his hand for a handshake. Mathematical formulae were jotted on the sleeve of his shirt, right up to the elbow. "Very good," said Peter. It had never occurred to him before that dark-skinned people didn't have the option of jotting numbers on their skin. You learned something new about human diversity every day.

Happiness was such an elusive thing to spot: it was like a camouflaged moth that might or might not be hidden in the forest in front of you, or might have flown away.

The walls shrugged themselves loose from their foundations and slid towards the centre of the room, as if attracted by the struggle. The ceiling, a massive rectangular slab of concrete furrowed with fluorescent white, also shuddered loose and loomed down on her.

Facts! Stick to the facts! That gets rid of 99 per cent of everything anyone's ever said or written, which cuts your homework down to a nice manageable size, doesn't it? Sniff out the truth!

It's not a colony," another of the USIC interviewers said, with an edge to her voice. "It's a community. We do not use the word colony.

Coincidences like that served as a reminder that, variations in pigment aside, humans were all part of the same species.

Following dragonflies didn't qualify as a clever or well-thought-out plan of action.

The crowds that queued for snacks and knick-knacks, the constant stream of passengers recorded by the closed-circuit TVs, were wondrous proof of the sheer variety of human specimens, except that they were presumed to be identically faithless inside, duty-free in every sense of that word.

Un solo día dedicado a cosas que no alimentan el espíritu es un día robado, mutilado y arrojado a la alcantarilla del destino.

The good that we do sinks into history like rainfall into the earth. The earth, being earth, cannot feel gratitude or award us with medals, but it can grow flowers, and that is our reward.

To be brutally honest, all these men were falling apart, hair by hair and tooth by tooth, like over-used pieces of equipment, like tools bought cheap for a job that would outlast them. While

Never too late for vocabulary building," he said.

Saxansaxo', for example, meant the smell and the coolness carried on the wind from a place where it's raining to a place where it isn't. how could one word mean something so marvellous?

The opulence of Bedford Square and the British Museum may be only a few hundred yards away, but New Oxford Street runs between there and here like a river too wide to swim, and you are on the wrong side.