Quotes from Sebastian Faulks

I've missed you, Frank.' 'I haven't breathed since you left.

In God's name, she thought, let the more loving one be someone else; for me it is beyond endurance.

One day, when you are grown up, you suddenly become aware that something has gone

At other times I sit and wait. If nothing comes, I've discovered that it's better just to write something – anything. You can always tear up the piece of paper and throw it away. But if you don't begin, then nothing comes. You have to submit.

the blade and began, very carefully, to make a shallow incision in the neck of a frog he had pinned, through its splayed feet, to the untreated wood.

I am something of a connoisseur of the country pile and I must say {he} had done himself remarkably well. At a guess I would say it was from the reign of Queen Anne and had been bunged up by some bewigged ancestor awash with loot from the War of the Spanish Succession or some such lucrative away fixture.

complication …. In that particular foggy business, I couldn't at this moment make out the wood for the trees, but one thing seemed fairly certain: this was

Levade had told her one day that there was no such thing as a coherent personality. When you are forty you have no cell in your body that you had at eighteen. It was the same, he said, with your character. Memory is the only thing that binds you to earlier selves; for the rest, you become an entirely different being every decade or so, sloughing off the old persona, renewing and moving on. You are not who you were, he told her, nor who you will be.

The Turks moved in the next day and killed everyone in sight, including the staff of the nursing home.

He wanted also to be forgiven for all he had done; he longed for the unity of the world's creation to melt his sins and anger, because his soul was joined to it. His body shook with the passion of the love that had found him, from which he had been exiled in the blood and the flesh of long killing.

No child or future generation will ever know what this was like. They will never understand. When it is over we will go quietly among the living and we will not tell them. We will talk and sleep and go about our business like human beings. We will seal what we have seen in the silence of our hearts and no words will reach us.

What is the most real thing you can think of?"] Jacques thought for a long time before answering; he tried to weigh up what was most vital and enduring in all that he had known. Eventually, no longer smiling, he said, 'Memory'.

Shakespeare drew a map of the human mind as clearly as Newton mapped the heavens. Wht is one considered science and the other fir only to be mocked with jokes about pretty girls and drury lane?

The truer urge she had was to provide for him what his life had lacked; there was an area of experience, of laughter and domestic pleasure, which was apparently unknown to him; and the shape of that absence seemed to be the shape of her own self.

I do not know what I have done to live in this existence. I do not know what any of us did to tilt the world into this unnatural orbit. We came here only for a few months. No child or future generation will ever know what this was like. They will never understand. When it is over we will go quietly among the living and we will not tell them. We will talk and sleep and go about our business like human beings. We will seal what we have seen in the silence of our hearts and no words will reach us

I liked slicing through the beige brain when it had been fixed; the texture reminded me of cooked cauliflower. It was wonderful to hold this shrunken organ in your hands, the formaldehyde running down over your wrists, and picture the billion firing synapse that for many years had made the cauliflower believe that it was Fred.

Many times I hav elaid down and longed for death. No future generation will ever know what this was like. They will never understand. When it is over we will go quietly among them living and we will note tell them. We will talk and step and go about our business like human beings. We will seal what we have seen in the silence of our hearts and no words will reach us.

I plunged my head under the water voluntarily...the physical shock took away the pain of being.

The strange thing was that it never did seem to satisfy them. They always looked disappointed when they let me go. I wished I could have pleased them, so they might have relented.

We have lived too closely, been through too much. I will not leave you. I cannot, any more than I can leave myself.

That flair for living.

I feel good when I leave the darkness of the cinema, it makes me feel my life is important. For a few minutes, I stroll along the dark streets, thinking of myself as someone in a film- a man with a character, a destiny. I become aware of my clothes and my physical mass; of my quiddity, my value.

He tried to sleep, but his head was filled with the faces of lunatics, their palsied hands, their shattered eyes.

Nothing should ever really surprise us because people are like icebergs, you only see the little bit on the top.