176 Quotes by Sebastian Faulks

With no blame there's no shame. A human society can't exist without shame. Shame is like handedness or walking upright. It's a central human attribute. In fact, it's the first human quality ever recorded.''Where?''Genesis, Chapter Three. The covering of nakedness. The acquisition of shame was the first consequence of consciousness, of the speciating moment. Take shame from me and you are calling me pre-human.

We have lived too closely, been through too much. I will not leave you. I cannot, any more than I can leave myself.

The thunder of false modesty was deafening.

I don't like being rumbled, I like to be invisible.

He tried to sleep, but his head was filled with the faces of lunatics, their palsied hands, their shattered eyes.

People wonder why you choose certain subjects to write about. The truth is: you don't really. They choose you

That's what opium does to suffering: makes it of hypothetical interest only.

All reality about me now appeared to be in tatters, taken down and reduced to the civil war of its particles. I held on very, very tight indeed. Because in addition to that feeling, that disintegration, there was rage. I wanted to break something.

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?