Top 70 Michel Faber Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that’s always been there, and the next minute it’s just a memory.”

— Michel Faber

2. “Nowadays, her life is more like a newspaper: aimless, up-to-date and full of meaningless events.”

— Michel Faber

3. “Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them.”

— Michel Faber

4. “Their consciousness was rudimentary.”

— Michel Faber

5. “God damn God and all His horrible filthy Creation.”

— Michel Faber

6. “Most distracting of all, though, was not the threat of danger but the allure of beauty.”

— Michel Faber

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

— Michel Faber

8. “Most true things are kind of corny, don’t you think? But we make them more sophisticated out of sheer embarrassment.”

— Michel Faber

9. “I am a fallen woman, but I assure you: I did not fall. I was pushed.”

— Michel Faber

10. “A single day spent doing things which fail to nourish the soul is a day stolen, mutilated, and discarded in the gutter of destiny.”

— Michel Faber

11. “She talks about being a Christian as if it’s a gym membership you can sign up for.”

— Michel Faber

12. “Participating in Society in not a thing one can do naturally; one has to rehearse for it.”

— Michel Faber

13. “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.”

— Michel Faber

14. “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.”

— Michel Faber

15. “Of course I know that the twins are only words on a page, and I’m certainly not the sort of writer who talks to his characters or harbours any illusions about the creative process. But at the same time, I think it’s juvenile and arrogant when literary writers compulsively remind their readers that the characters aren’t real. People know that already. The challenge is to make an intelligent reader suspend disbelief, to seduce them into the reality of a narrative.”

— Michel Faber

16. “I sometimes think that the only things really worth talking about are the things people absolutely refuse to discuss.”

— Michel Faber

17. “A truly modern man, William Rackham is what might be called a superstitious atheist Christian; that is, he believes in a God who, while He may no longer be responsible for the sun rising, the saving of the Queen or the provision of daily bread, is still the prime suspect when anything goes wrong.”

— Michel Faber

18. “Men! Armchair heroes the lot of them, while women were sent out to do the dirty work.”

— Michel Faber

19. “Clothes are nothing more than a fig leaf. And the bodies beneath are just another layer of clothing, an outfit of flesh with an impractically thin leather exterior, in various shades of pink, yellow and brown. The souls alone are real. Seen in this way, there can never be any such thing as social unease or shyness or embarrassment. All you need do is greet your fellow soul.”

— Michel Faber

20. “The indiscriminate, eternal devotion of nature to its numberless particles had an emotional importance for Isserley; it put the.”

— Michel Faber

21. “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.”

— Michel Faber

22. “Strange how a specimen like him, well cared for, healthy, free to roam the world, and blessed with a perfection of form which would surely have allowed him to breed with a greater selection of females than average, could still be so miserable. By contrast, other males, scarred by neglect, riddled with diseases, spurned by their kind, were occasionally known to radiate a contentment that seemed to arise from something more enigmatic than mere stupidity.”

— Michel Faber

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

— Michel Faber

24. “Reading, by its very nature, is an admission of defeat, a ritual of self-humiliation: it shows that you believe other lives are more interesting than yours.”

— Michel Faber

25. “What do you expect? This place is one big anti-climax.”

— Michel Faber

26. “Never too late for vocabulary building,” he said.”

— Michel Faber

27. “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.”

— Michel Faber

28. “Nothing happened, and time stubbornly refused to pass.”

— Michel Faber

29. “So much for yesterday. Today, Sophie’s formal education must begin. Dressing the lamb before the kill, as Mrs Castaway once put it, when Sugar dared to ask what, exactly, education is.”

— Michel Faber

30. “We are all specialised forms of survivor. We lack what we fundamentally need and forge ahead regardless, hurriedly hiding our wounds, disguising our ineptitude, bluffing our way through our weaknesses.”

— Michel Faber

31. “How strange it was to be inside a machine again! All his life he’d been inside machines, whether he realised it or not. Modern houses were machines. Shopping centres were machines. Schools. Cars. Trains. Cities. They were all sophisticated technological constructs, wired up with lights and motors. You switched them on, and didn’t spare them a thought while they pampered you with unnatural services.”

— Michel Faber

32. “Being apart was wrong. Simply lying side by side did more for a relationship than words. A warm bed, a nest of animal intimacy. Words could be misunderstood, whereas loving companionship bred trust.”

— Michel Faber

33. “Peter was struck by the scar’s essential nature: it was not a disfigurement, it was a miracle. All the scars ever suffered by anyone in the whole of human history were not suffering but triumph: triumph against decay, triumph against death.”

— Michel Faber

34. “And you know what people immediately start looking for, five minutes after they arrive someplace new? You know what’s on their minds? I’ll tell you: How are they gonna get laid, and where are they gonna find some mind-altering substances.”

— Michel Faber

35. “There was a red button on the wall labelled EMERGENCY, but no button labelled BEWILDERMENT.”

— Michel Faber

36. “The holy book he’d spent so much of his life preaching from had one cruel flaw: it was not very good at offering encouragement or hope to those who weren’t religious.”

— Michel Faber

37. “This is a street where the weaker souls crawl into bed as soon as the sun sets and lie awake listening to the rats.”

— Michel Faber

38. “History indulges strange whims in the way it dresses its women.”

— Michel Faber

39. “Her invisible remains would combine, over time, with all the wonders under the sun. When it snowed she would be part of it, falling softly to earth, rising up again with the snow’s evaporation, When it rained, she would be there in the spectral arch that spanned from firth to ground. She would help to wreathe the fields in mists, and yet would always be transparent to the stars. She would live forever.”

— Michel Faber

40. “You know,’ Amlis went on, ‘Some water fell out of the sky not so long ago.’ His voice was a little higher than usual, vulnerable with awe. ‘It just fell out of the sky. In little droplets, thousands of them close together. I looked up to see where they were coming from. They seemed to be materializing out of nowhere. I couldn’t believe it. Then I opened my mouth to the sky. Some droplets fell straight in. It was an indescribable feeling. As if nature was actually trying to nurture me.”

— Michel Faber

41. “God, Agnes has decided, is an Anglican, whereas Our Lady is of the True Faith; the two of Them have an uneasy relationship, unable to agree on anything, except that if They divorce, the Devil will leap gleefully into the breach. So, They tolerate each other, and take care of the world as best They can. Moving.”

— Michel Faber

42. “Unreality was swirling all around her like the delirious miasmas.”

— Michel Faber

43. “MERCY. It was a word she’d rarely encountered.”

— Michel Faber

44. “William pouts irritably. Socialism is not the same thing as letting one’s servants muddle towards anarchy. But never mind, never mind: on a day like today, it’s not worth worrying over. Soon the servant question, at least in William Rackham’s household, will be resolved beyond any ambiguity.”

— Michel Faber

45. “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.”

— Michel Faber

46. “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.”

— Michel Faber

47. “There is so little in the New Testament about sexual love, and most of it consists of Paul heaving a deep sigh and tolerating it like a weakness.”

— Michel Faber

48. “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.”

— Michel Faber

49. “Prostitution.′ He enunciates the word clearly, gazing directly into her eyes, knowing, God damn it, that he is being cruel. In the back of his mind, a kinder William Rackham watches impotently as his wife is penetrated by that single elongated word, its four slick syllables barbed midway with t’s. Agnes’s cameo face goes white as she gulps for air.”

— Michel Faber

50. “These days, the bigger the company, the less you can figure out what it does.”

— Michel Faber