Quotes from Sebastian Faulks

I never for a moment considered killing myself, because it wouldn't have achieved anything.

Until we can navigate in time, I'm not sure that we can prove that what happened is real.

You can't recall someone whose name has worn away.

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.

I don't find life unbearably grave. I find it almost intolerably frivolous.

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.

But I can hardly remember what it felt like. It's like everything that happens to you. It doesn't feel real.

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.

He threw up the conkers into the air in his great happiness. In the tree above him they disturbed a roosting crow, which erupted from the branches with an explosive bang of its wings, then rose up above him towards the sky, its harsh, ambiguous call coming back in long, grating waves towards the earth, to be heard by those still living.

The past was suddenly rushing in on me in a way I found hard to fight.

There had always seemed to me a frightening amount of chance in the way that people chose their careers.

But the weight of her anguish over Gregory – this one missing airman, this unreliable, perhaps unworthy man – filled her whole upper half, diaphragm, lungs, ribs, shoulders, with such crushing gravity that the sighs with which she was obliged to displace it shook her entire body.

It's better to have a malign providence than an indifferent one.

Currents of desire and excitement that she had not known or thought about for years now flooded in her. She wanted him to bring alive what she had buried, and to demean, destroy, her fabricated self.

We're not really conscious of what we're doing most of the time.

The function of music is to liberate in the soul those feelings that normally we keep locked up in the heart.

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.

How grand, to be a Doctor of whatever and to weigh up and decide people's future.

To wake up and feel enlivened; to be in a hurry to get out of bed and into the day. To have friends you want to speak to, compare experiences with and be on the phone to...Well, to be honest, I'm still some way from that.

I felt trapped in a world that I couldn't mould to my own desires. Others were in sunlight; I was in darkness.

The partition between love and anger is thin. I suppose it's a need to protect the self from further wounding that makes people scream at the one they love.

His own men, those who would attack in the morning, knelt on the earth, faces hidden behind one hand, in an agonizing tunnel of their own, a darkness where there was no time but where they tried to look on death.

They saw the Scots coming up out of their burrows like raving women in their skirts, dying in ripples across the yellowish-brown soil. They saw the steady tread of the Hampshire's as though they had willingly embarked on a slow-motion dance from which they were content not to return. They saw men from every corner walking, powerless, into an engulfing storm.

The Red Lion was a four-ale bar with a handful of lowbrowed sons of toil who looked as though they might be related to one another in ways frowned on by the Old Testament.