148 Quotes by Michel Faber

But miracles are not for the asking; they come only when the stern eyes of God droop shut for a moment, and Our Lady takes advantage of His inattention to grant an illicit mercy. God...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.

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

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

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

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.

Well, here we are."Sometimes a statement of the bloody obvious was the only appropriate way forward. As if to give life ceremonious permission to proceed.

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

He was too frightened to speak. This was no hallucination. This was what happened to the universe when you were no longer able to hold it together. Atoms in clusters, rays of light, forming ephemeral shapes before moving on. His greatest fear, as he dissolved into the dark, was that he would never see other humans the same way again.

How’s things, man?” The black man extended his hand for a handshake. Mathematical formulae were jotted on the sleeve of his shirt, right up to the elbow.“Very good,” said Peter. It had never occurred to him before that dark-skinned people didn’t have the option of jotting numbers on their skin. You learned something new about human diversity every day.