Certainly, we all have within us the potential to live in a hugely different way. And how happy you can make yourself, I think, a lot depends on how much you beat yourself up about that; and how much you can, in some sort of providential way, console yourself and say, 'Well, it's all worked out for the best, in the best of all possible worlds.'

Sebastian Faulks

Categorized in : You Best Yourself Happy

The function of music is to liberate in the soul those feelings which normally we keep locked up in the heart.

Sebastian Faulks

soul feelings heart

You put your time where your priority is.

Sebastian Faulks

priorities

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.

Sebastian Faulks

fun book lying

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

self memories moving

Our own choices might not be as good as those that are made for us.

Sebastian Faulks

choices made might

Oh, the sweetness of giving in, of full surrender.

Sebastian Faulks

sweetness surrender giving

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

solitary lonely mean

The end-of-summer winds make people restless.

Sebastian Faulks

summer wind people

Inhale and hold the evening in your lungs.

Sebastian Faulks

lungs inhale evening

One thing about London is that when you step out into the night, it swallows you.

Sebastian Faulks

london steps night

We're deaf men working as musicians; we play the music but we can't hear it.

Sebastian Faulks

musician play men

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

fighting simple believe

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

chosen used way

If I could eat only one thing for the rest of my life, it would be rhubarb fool, which I make with ginger and a hint of elderflower cordial.

Sebastian Faulks

hints fool would-be

I don't find life unbearably grave. I find it almost intolerably frivolous.

Sebastian Faulks

frivolous graves

I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.

Sebastian Faulks

void soul reflection

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

opposites cards thinking

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

Sebastian Faulks

I suppose I was lucky enough to be educated at a time when teachers still thought children could handle knowledge. They trusted us. Then there came a time when they decided that because not every kid in the class could understand or remember those things they wouldn't teach them anymore because it wasn't fair on the less good ones. So they withheld knowledge. Then I suppose the next lot of teachers didn't have the knowledge to withhold.

Sebastian Faulks

teacher kids children

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

Sebastian Faulks

invisible