Top 100 Sebastian Faulks Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You put your time where your priority is.”

— Sebastian Faulks

2. “There you are, sir. There’s nothing more than to love and be loved.”

— Sebastian Faulks

3. “My direction? Anywhere. Because one is always nearer by not keeping still.”

— Sebastian Faulks

4. “I have written millions of words about contemporary England – in journalism. Why don’t I take it as the background for a novel? I may do one day. But the simple answer is that it does not excite the novelistic part of my brain; it does not fire it up.”

— Sebastian Faulks

5. “It’s better to have a malign providence than an indifferent one.”

— Sebastian Faulks

6. “The function of music is to liberate in the soul those feelings which normally we keep locked up in the heart.”

— Sebastian Faulks

7. “I will think of you every day. All the time. If ever you should think of me and wonder what I’m doing, I’m thinking of you. That’s all I’ll be doing. Nothing else.”

— Sebastian Faulks

8. “This intimacy is not necessary; no one is compelling me to open my inmost self and lay it naked, undefended, against that of another – merely for the joy of the communion.”

— Sebastian Faulks

9. “I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.”

— Sebastian Faulks

10. “Inhale and hold the evening in your lungs.”

— Sebastian Faulks

11. “Something had been buried that was not yet dead.”

— Sebastian Faulks

12. “I’d never chosen to be alone, but that was the way things had turned out, and I’d grown used to it.”

— Sebastian Faulks

13. “One thing about London is that when you step out into the night, it swallows you.”

— Sebastian Faulks

14. “The end-of-summer winds make people restless.”

— Sebastian Faulks

15. “The nicest characters in A Week in December are, in fact, Muslims – and their religious devotion is one of the things that defines them.”

— Sebastian Faulks

16. “This is not a war, this is an exploration of how far men can be degraded.”

— Sebastian Faulks

17. “Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.”

— Sebastian Faulks

18. “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.”

— Sebastian Faulks

19. “Have you ever been lonely? No, neither have I. Solitary, yes. Alone, certainly. But lonely means minding about being on your own. I’ve never minded about it.”

— Sebastian Faulks

20. “And sometimes in life, I imagine, good things do happen. Most of the time, it’s the opposite, obviously. But I don’t think you should rule out the possibility that just occasionally chance might deal you a good card.”

— Sebastian Faulks

21. “The thunder of false modesty was deafening.”

— Sebastian Faulks

22. “If I could eat only one thing for the rest of my life, it would be rhubarb fool, which I make with ginger and a hint of elderflower cordial.”

— Sebastian Faulks

23. “Life can be lived at a remove. You trade in futures, and then you trade in derivatives of futures. Banks make more money trading derivatives than they do trading actual commodities.”

— Sebastian Faulks

24. “I don’t think you ever understand your life – not till it’s finished and probably not then either. The more I live the less I seem to understand.”

— Sebastian Faulks

25. “In the 1970s, British food was beginning to get good, whereas in France it was just starting its long, sad decline. My most memorable meals, however, have been in Italy.”

— Sebastian Faulks

26. “Some crime against nature is about to be committed. I feel it in my veins. These men and boys are grocers and clerks, gardeners and fathers – fathers of small children. A country cannot bear to lose them.”

— Sebastian Faulks

27. “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.”

— Sebastian Faulks

28. “This is how most people live: alive, but not conscious; conscious but not aware; aware, but intermittently.”

— Sebastian Faulks

29. “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.”

— Sebastian Faulks

30. “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.”

— Sebastian Faulks

31. “We’re deaf men working as musicians; we play the music but we can’t hear it.”

— Sebastian Faulks

32. “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?”

— Sebastian Faulks

33. “One of the hardest things about being alive is being with other people.”

— Sebastian Faulks

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

— Sebastian Faulks

35. “Which of us can deny that at some level we are afflicted by a sense that our human lives are incomplete and that there lies, just beyond the reach of our perceptions, a paradise that once was ours?”

— Sebastian Faulks

36. “Our own choices might not be as good as those that are made for us.”

— Sebastian Faulks

37. “I am driven by a greater force than I can resist. I believe that force has its own reason and its own morality even if they may never be clear to me while I am alive.”

— Sebastian Faulks

38. “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.”

— Sebastian Faulks

39. “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.”

— Sebastian Faulks

40. “They had seen things no human eyes had looked on before, and they had not turned their gaze away. They were in their own view a formidable group of men. No inferno would now melt them, no storm destroy, because they had seen the worst and they had survived.”

— Sebastian Faulks

41. “A time before Flanders and Auschwitz had shown that, given the means of killing and the opportunity to use them, the species, far from being a pinnacle in creation, was actually lower on the scale than all others in its genus or family.”

— Sebastian Faulks

42. “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.”

— Sebastian Faulks

43. “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.”

— Sebastian Faulks

44. “The thought of all that happiness was hard to bear. What’s the point of happiness when all it does is throw the facts of dying into clear relief?”

— Sebastian Faulks

45. “Until she had had children of her own she had not been able to contemplate the death of either of her parents; when the subject had arisen, in conversation or in her own imagining, she had said only: I just don’t know what I’d do.”

— Sebastian Faulks

46. “I suppose that each of us may have a great moment in our life, a month, a week a year, when we are most fully what we are meant to be.”

— Sebastian Faulks

47. “I don’t like being rumbled, I like to be invisible.”

— Sebastian Faulks

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

— Sebastian Faulks

49. “That’s what opium does to suffering: makes it of hypothetical interest only.”

— Sebastian Faulks

50. “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.”

— Sebastian Faulks