Sebastian Faulks

“But the weight of her anguish over Gregory – this one missing airman, this unreliable, perhaps unworthy man – filled her whole upper half, diaphragm, lungs, ribs, shoulders, with such crushing gravity that the sighs with which she was obliged to displace it shook her entire body.”

“He saw a picture in his mind of a terrible piling up of the dead. It came from his contemplation of the church, but it had its own clarity: the row on row, the deep rotting earth hollowed out to hold them, while the efforts of the living, with all their works and wars and great buildings, were no more than the beat of a wing against the weight of time.”

“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.”

“He threw up the conkers into the air in his great happiness. In the tree above him they disturbed a roosting crow, which erupted from the branches with an explosive bang of its wings, then rose up above him towards the sky, its harsh, ambiguous call coming back in long, grating waves towards the earth, to be heard by those still living.”

“It's better to have a malign providence than an indifferent one.”

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

“Sometimes my whole life seems like a dream; occasionally I think that someone else has lived it for me. The events and the sensations, the stories and the things that make me what I am in the eyes of other people, the list of facts that make my life ... They could be mine, they might be yours.”

“Knowing one was comprised of recycled matter only and that selfhood was a delusion did not take away the aching of the heart.”

“This intimacy is not necessary; no one is compelling me to open my inmost self and lay it naked, undefended, against that of another – merely for the joy of the communion.”

“If not just the brain but the quirks that made the individual were composed of recycled matter only, it was hard to be sure where the edges of one such being ended and another person began.”

“Weir heard something different in the sounds. Once, during a period of calm, he sat on the firestep waiting for Stephen to return from an inspection and listened to the music of the tins. The empty ones were sonorous, the fuller ones provided an ascending scale. Those filled to the brim produced only a fat percussive beat unless they overbalanced, when the cascade would give a loud variation. Within earshot there were scores of tins in different states of fullness and with varying resonance. Then he heard the wire moving in the wind. It set up a moaning background noise that would occasionally gust into prominence, then lapse again to mere accompaniment. He had to work hard to discern, or perhaps imagine, a melody in this tin music, but it was better in his ears than the awful sound of shellfire.”

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

“Something had been buried that was not yet dead.”

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

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

“He wrote one more paragraph for his own sake, to see what he had to say.”

“That night Christine Hartmann went to bed with a book she had taken from among the many that lay strewn around the Manor. From an early age she had developed the art of being alone and generally preferred her own company to anyone else's. She read books at enormous speed and judged them entirely on their ability to remove her from her material surroundings. In almost all the unhappiest days of her life she had been able to escape from her own inner world by living temporarily in someone else's, and on the two or three occasions that she had been too upset to concentrate she had been desolate.”

“Until we can navigate in time, I'm not sure that we can prove that what happened is real.”

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

“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.”

“The physical shock took away the pain of being.”

“I never for a moment considered killing myself, because it wouldn't have achieved anything.”

“We're not really conscious of what we're doing most of the time.”

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

“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.”

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

“The best thing is the combined effect of nicotine with alcohol, greater than the sum of the two parts.”

“The thing about opium is that it makes pain or difficulty unimaginable.”

“The past was suddenly rushing in on me in a way I found hard to fight.”

“One of the hardest things about being alive is being with other people.”

“I'd never chosen to be alone, but that was the way things had turned out, and I'd grown used to it.”

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

“She was so beautiful I had to move away.”

“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.”

“We all operate on different levels of awareness. Half the time I don't know what I'm doing.”

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

“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.”

“It was entirely silent and I tried to breathe its peace.”

“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?”

“This is how most people live: alive, but not conscious; conscious but not aware; aware, but intermittently.”

“I felt trapped in a world that I couldn't mould to my own desires. Others were in sunlight; I was in darkness.”

“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.”

“I'd become more adept at being with other people; I'd lowered my expectations of them and learned to let my mind drift into neutral when they spoke.”

“Grief is a peculiar emotion.”

“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.”

“But I can hardly remember what it felt like. It's like everything that happens to you. It doesn't feel real.”

“They're so attached to their patterns that they've forgotten rule number one of human behavior: there are no patterns. People just do things. There's no such things as a coherent and fully integrated human personality, let alone consistent motivation.”

“If you're mad enough to have killed a dozen people you're mad enough to be a fraction impatient. Surely?”

“To wake up and feel enlivened; to be in a hurry to get out of bed and into the day. To have friends you want to speak to, compare experiences with and be on the phone to...Well, to be honest, I'm still some way from that.”

“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.”