176 Quotes by Sebastian Faulks

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.

Knowing one was comprised of recycled matter only and that selfhood was a delusion did not take away the aching of the heart.

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.

My own diagnosis of my problem is a simpler one. It's that I share 50 per cent of my genome with a banana and 98 per cent with a chimpanzee. Banana's don't do psychological consistency. And the tiny part of us that's different - the special Homo sapiens bit - is faulty. It doesn't work. Sorry about that.

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

Lonely's like any other organism; competitive and resourceful in the struggle to perpetuate itself.

He wrote one more paragraph for his own sake, to see what he had to say.

He saw a picture in his mind of a terrible piling up of the dead. It came from his contemplation of the church, but it had its own clarity: the row on row, the deep rotting earth hollowed out to hold them, while the efforts of the living, with all their works and wars and great buildings, were no more than the beat of a wing against the weight of time.

Something had been buried that was not yet dead.