176 Quotes by Sebastian Faulks

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.

People never explain to you exactly what they think and feel and how their thoughts and feelings work, do they? They don't have time. Or the right words. But that's what books do. It's as though your daily life is a film in the cinema. It can be fun, looking at those pictures. But if you want to know what lies behind the flat screen you have to read a book. That explains it all.

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

You can’t recall someone whose name has worn away.

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.

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

If at the one moment in your life when the chance of something transcendental is offered to you, if you have this chance to move beyond the surface of things, to understand – and you say, No, maybe not... What then? How do you explain the rest of your life to yourself? How do you pass the time until you die? Do you substitute for that an interest in what – eating? Do you spend the next sixty years trying to be fascinated by the act of breathing?

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

One thing I had learned from medicine, however, was that denial was often a good strategy; it could buy time for wounds to heal themselves.