Quotes from Sebastian Faulks

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.

We all operate on different levels of awareness. Half the time I don't know what I'm doing.

she read with undifferentiated glee . . .

The thing about opium is that it makes pain or difficulty unimaginable.

The best thing is the combined effect of nicotine with alcohol, greater than the sum of the two parts.

We're deaf men working as musicians; we play the music but we can't hear it.

It was entirely silent and I tried to breathe its peace.

I don't like being rumbled, I like to be invisible.

Knowing one was comprised of recycled matter only and that selfhood was a delusion did not take away the aching of the heart.

A bit of the vagueness of music stops you going completely mad, I imagine.

The physical shock took away the pain of being.

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.

I wonder what it's like to be dead.

Why take drugs specifically designed to send you insane?

The thunder of false modesty was deafening.

It's only after the change is fully formed that you can see what's happened.

She was so beautiful I had to move away.

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 told me. My God no one told me

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.

He didn't ask himself if she was beautiful, because the physical effect of her presence made the question insignificant.

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.

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.

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.

That's what opium does to suffering: makes it of hypothetical interest only.