1
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
2
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
3
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
4
I looked at him on the bed. He coughed once and a trail of brownish dead blood came out of his mouth and ran down the side of his chin. Then he stopped breathing. And I thought, I'll make sure I never end up here, either.Sebastian Faulks
5
There was a pretty young woman I used to see pegging out sheets and I worried that she would grow old there and that no one would know how beautiful she was. And maybe she would die without ever having really lived.Sebastian Faulks
6
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
7
You put your time where your priority is.Sebastian Faulks
8
We're not really conscious of what we're doing most of the time.Sebastian Faulks
9
Until we can navigate in time, I'm not sure that we can prove that what happened is real.Sebastian Faulks
10
I breathed and breathed and did feel some calmness enter in, though it was, as always, shot with a sense of loss. Loss and fear.Sebastian Faulks
11
It's only after the change is fully formed that you can see what's happened.Sebastian Faulks
12
And in that history you're trying to connect to something that once was yours - to something purer, better, something that you lost or something, maybe, that you never knew but that you feel you knew.Sebastian Faulks
13
It was entirely silent and I tried to breathe its peace.Sebastian Faulks
14
The thing about opium is that it makes pain or difficulty unimaginable.Sebastian Faulks
15
The physical shock took away the pain of being.Sebastian Faulks
16
A bit of the vagueness of music stops you going completely mad, I imagine.Sebastian Faulks
17
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.Sebastian Faulks
18
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.Sebastian Faulks
19
How grand, to be a Doctor of whatever and to weigh up and decide people's future.Sebastian Faulks
20
Grief is a peculiar emotion.Sebastian Faulks
21
Heisenberg and Bohr and Einstein strike me as being like gifted retriever dogs. Off they go, not just for an afternoon, but for ten years; they come back exhausted and triumphant and drop at your feet... a vole. It's a remarkable thing in its way, a vole–intricate, beautiful really, marvellous. But does it... Does it help? Does it move the mattSebastian Faulks
22
The past was suddenly rushing in on me in a way I found hard to fight.Sebastian Faulks
23
I never for a moment considered killing myself, because it wouldn't have achieved anything.Sebastian Faulks
24
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.Sebastian Faulks
25
She was so beautiful I had to move away.Sebastian Faulks
26
We all operate on different levels of awareness. Half the time I don't know what I'm doing.Sebastian Faulks
27
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
28
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
29
One thing about London is that when you step out into the night, it swallows you.Sebastian Faulks
30
Why take drugs specifically designed to send you insane?Sebastian Faulks
31
Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.Sebastian Faulks
32
The best thing is the combined effect of nicotine with alcohol, greater than the sum of the two parts.Sebastian Faulks
33
The end-of-summer winds make people restless.Sebastian Faulks
34
Oh, the sweetness of giving in, of full surrender.Sebastian Faulks