Michel Faber Quotes

They both sat in silence for the rest of the journey, as if conscious of having let each other down.

I get increasingly respectful of people who have faith and increasingly creeped out by them.

Men! Armchair heroes the lot of them, while women were sent out to do the dirty work.

God damn God and all His horrible filthy Creation.

Isn't Heaven reward enough, without needing to see the damned punished?

In 1978, when I was 17 and in my first year at university, I read approximately 3,500 pages of Dickens.

When we ask bureaucrats to identify who is responsible for fixing anything, they reassure us that there are 'procedures in place.'

The word troubled her, though. 'Indispensable.' It was a word people tended to resort to when dispensability was in the air.

Most true things are kind of corny, don't you think? But we make them more sophisticated out of sheer embarrassment.

A single day spent doing things which fail to nourish the soul is a day stolen, mutilated, and discarded in the gutter of destiny.

She and they were all the same under the skin, weren't they?

Unreality was swirling all around her like the delirious miasmas

Shared suffering, she'd found, was no guarantee of intimacy.

A simple fuck is one thing, but let a man sleep with you just once and he thinks he can bring his dog and his pigeons.

I'm still tremendously proud of 'Crimson Petal.' I'm still very emotionally involved with these characters. I still care about them.

I am open-eyed about what poverty does to people.

What do you expect? This place is one big anti-climax.

The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that's always been there, and the next minute it's just a memory.

I'm a loner and always have been.

It was already tomorrow. She should have known from the beginning that it would end like this.

Forgive me, Lord, for the smallness and selfishness of my mind. Amen.

Coincidences like that served as a reminder that, variations in pigment aside, humans were all part of the same species.

There is so little in the New Testament about sexual love, and most of it consists of Paul heaving a deep sigh and tolerating it like a weakness.

Could indicate the cocky self-awareness of a male in prime condition.

All my novels are about people who strive to heal and evolve.

Because human beings suffer so much more than ducks."
"You might not think so if you were a duck.

Sunlight is bad,' he wheezes. 'It's the exact same stuff as breeds maggots in wounded soldiers' legs. And when there's no war on, it fades wallpaper.

Can't you see that? Everybody's sentimental, everybody.

Most distracting of all, though, was not the threat of danger but the allure of beauty.

History indulges strange whims in the way it dresses its women.

Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them.

a child's disquiet is as potent as a damp fart.

Nothing happened, and time stubbornly refused to pass.

Vess Incorporated had simply dug them out of one hole and buried them in another

We're moving towards such a strange time.A time when all our moral choices will be complicated and compromised by our love of progress

Only the other day, Robbie had gone to a terrible disco in Alness, hoping it would transform his life in some way.

MERCY. It was a word she'd rarely encountered

Isserley walked along the path the generations of sheep-flocks had made, up the tiers of the hill. In her mind, she was already

I think I have written the things I was put on Earth to write.

Proof, once again, that reality was not objective, but always waiting to be reshaped and redefined by one's attitude.

In all of my work, I think I'm exploring the idea that we are aliens to each other, how there is a huge distance that separates us all.

On an average day, I spend 12 hours listening to music. Very little writing.

God preserve us from fuddle-headed young men who want money for building cloud-castles!

Their consciousness was rudimentary.

Away, and she could carry a bag on each arm, providing

Art is head space that is very exclusive: it shuts people out; other people cease to exist.

Nowadays, her life is more like a newspaper: aimless, up-to-date and full of meaningless events

Pathos and poignancy are, to me, tactics and techniques; in my work as a writer, I fetch them from my toolbox and use them as required.

Their wealth makes them like a different creature, an exotic thing that doesn't have to function like a human.

I tend to process emotional stuff very, very slowly.

In every Christian's life there comes a time when he or she needs to know the precise circumstances under which God is willing to heal the sick.

It was such an infantile prayer, the sort of prayer a five-year-old might pray. But maybe those were the best kind.

Because I must do something while I still can. Each soul is still incalculably precious.

These days, the bigger the company, the less you can figure out what it does.

I was disinclined to have the status of a writer.

[ ... ] how can one sleep while dancing at the edge of waves?

One of the things my success as an author has forced me to face is how dysfunctional ... Maybe that's a strong word, but how obsessive I am.

Grainger looked exasperated. "Why don't you just come straight out and use the word aliens?
"Because we're the aliens here.

Needs could not bully her.

Really good books need a chaos element: something weird or inexplicable.

It's not a colony," another of the USIC interviewers said, with an edge to her voice. "It's a community. We do not use the word colony.

This is a street where the weaker souls crawl into bed as soon as the sun sets and lie awake listening to the rats.

I sometimes think that the only things really worth talking about are the things people absolutely refuse to discuss.

I just wish," she said, "that this magnificent, stupendous God of yours could give a fuck.

She holds her head as high as if she were beautiful, and holds her body as if she were strong.

When the person you love has cancer, they are, in a sense, living on Planet Cancer. They are in a place where you are not. And you can't follow them.

It was a husk, no longer truly their mother - more like their mother's most treasured possession, which had been given to them as a parting gift.

I had been attempting novels since I was 14 but always ran out of steam. High hopes, poor craftsmanship.

That was the sort of thing crazy people did - instinctively choosing the experiences that confirmed their own negative attitudes.

She talks about being a Christian as if it's a gym membership you can sign up for.

What do his ambitions matter, if those are her collar-bones?

I am a fallen woman, but I assure you: I did not fall. I was pushed.

The indiscriminate, eternal devotion of nature to its numberless particles had an emotional importance for Isserley; it put the

Never too late for vocabulary building, he said.

I wouldn't use the word 'man'. The Hebrew is ha-adam, which I would argue encompasses both sexes.

If someone's a cartoon villain, you can dismiss them, but if they behave despicably but you kind of like them, they really get under your skin.

You want Paradise, you gotta build it on war, on blood, on envy and naked greed.

Anyway, when sophisticated technology fails, primitive technology steps in to do the job.

Wrinkles of the future, cicatrices of the past, all the million marks recording a private life that no outsider could ever understand.

If she were its leader. Not that she ever would be: she was born to be a dissenter within a larger certainty, she knows that.

Reassurance is such a sad, mad thing. Deep inside, everyone knows the truth.

Belief was a place that people didn't leave until they absolutely must.

Protective of his gleaming domain, beavering away in it alone like an obsessed scientist in a humid and luridly lit laboratory.

There was a red button on the wall labelled EMERGENCY, but no button labelled BEWILDERMENT.

For years, I was quite a militant atheist. I wanted to burn down all the churches or turn them into second-hand record emporiums.

Was it always the desirable ones that sat in silence, and the misshapen rejects that prattled away unprompted?

Oh how she wondered, what she looked like to him, in his alien innocence.

Participating in Society in not a thing one can do naturally; one has to rehearse for it.

reality was not objective, but always waiting to be reshaped and redefined by one's attitude. Of

Why, the top-notch gentleman visits his hatter every few days just to have his hat ironed!