A bit of the vagueness of music stops you going completely mad, I imagine.

— Sebastian Faulks

All my life I had lived on the presumption that there was no existence beyond... flesh, the moment of being alive... then nothing. I had searched in superstition... But there was nothing. Then I heard the sound of my own life leaving me. It was so... tender. I regretted that I had paid it no attention. Then I believed in the wisdom of what other men had found before me... I saw that those simple things might be true... I never wanted to believe in them because it was better to fight my own battle. You can believe in something without compromising the burden of your own existence.

— Sebastian Faulks

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

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

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

A romantic is someone who believes that something is valuable even if it doesn't last. And a non-romantic is someone who says that if something doesn't endure, or can't be logically proved and pinned down, it's worthless.

— Sebastian Faulks

Currents of desire and excitement that she had not known or thought about for years now flooded in her. She wanted him to bring alive what she had buried, and to demean, destroy, her fabricated self.

— Sebastian Faulks

Depression - that limp word for the storm of black panic and half-demented malfunction - had over the years worked itself out in Charlotte's life in a curious pattern. Its onset was often imperceptible: like an assiduous housekeeper locking up a rambling mansion, it noiselessly went about and turned off, one by one, the mind's thousand small accesses to pleasure.

— Sebastian Faulks

Evade had told her one day that there was no such thing as a coherent personality. When you are forty you have no cell in your body that you had at eighteen. It was the same, he said, with your character. 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.

— Sebastian Faulks

Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.

— Sebastian Faulks