Michel Faber Famous Quotes & Sayings
100 Michel Faber Famous Sayings, Quotes and Quotation.
These days, the bigger the company, the less you can figure out what it does.— Michel Faber
The mere fact of my novel being filmed means very little to me. For a long while after 'The Crimson Petal's publication in 2002, it looked as though Hollywood was going to adapt it.— Michel Faber
Vess Incorporated had simply dug them out of one hole and buried them in another— Michel Faber
Participating in Society in not a thing one can do naturally; one has to rehearse for it.— Michel Faber
I am a fallen woman, but I assure you: I did not fall. I was pushed.— Michel Faber
I think I have written the things I was put on Earth to write.— Michel Faber
Nothing happened, and time stubbornly refused to pass.— Michel Faber
A text may be superbly written, exquisitely subtle, deeply meaningful, but still seem like a luxury extra, something we add to the already well-stocked store of our reading experience.— Michel Faber
The indiscriminate, eternal devotion of nature to its numberless particles had an emotional importance for Isserley; it put the— Michel Faber
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.— Michel Faber
UFCNo such thing as childhood memories, he says. We're just playing games with our neurons every day, tossing them around the hippocampus, constructing little fairy tales featuring characters named after people we used to live with. 'Your dad is just a flurry of molecular activity in your frontal lobe' he'll tell you...— Michel Faber
Needs could not bully her.— Michel Faber
That was the sort of thing crazy people did - instinctively choosing the experiences that confirmed their own negative attitudes.— Michel Faber
I wouldn't use the word 'man'. The Hebrew is ha-adam, which I would argue encompasses both sexes.— Michel Faber
Peter was struck by the scar's essential nature: it was not a disfigurement, it was a miracle. All the scars ever suffered by anyone in the whole of human history were not suffering but triumph: triumph against decay, triumph against death.— Michel Faber
Clothes are nothing more than a fig leaf. And the bodies beneath are just another layer of clothing, an outfit of flesh with an impractically thin leather exterior, in various shades of pink, yellow and brown. The souls alone are real. Seen in this way, there can never be any such thing as social unease or shyness or embarrassment. All you need do is greet your fellow soul.— Michel Faber
Hope is a fragile thing, Peter continued, as fragile as a flower. Its fragility makes it easy to sneer at, by people who see life as a dark and difficult ordeal, people who get angry when something they can't believe in themselves gives comfort to others. They prefer to crush the flower underfoot, as if to say: See how weak this thing is, see how easily it can be destroyed. But, in truth, hope is one of the strongest things in the universe. Empires fall, civilizations vanish into dust, but hope always comes back, pushing up through the ashes, growing from seeds that are invisible and invincible.— Michel Faber
a child's disquiet is as potent as a damp fart.— Michel Faber
Grainger looked exasperated. "Why don't you just come straight out and use the word aliens?— Michel Faber
"Because we're the aliens here.
What do his ambitions matter, if those are her collar-bones?— Michel Faber
I get increasingly respectful of people who have faith and increasingly creeped out by them.— Michel Faber
You know,' Amlis went on, 'Some water fell out of the sky not so long ago.' His voice was a little higher than usual, vulnerable with awe. 'It just fell out of the sky. In little droplets, thousands of them close together. I looked up to see where they were coming from. They seemed to be materializing out of nowhere. I couldn't believe it. Then I opened my mouth to the sky. Some droplets fell straight in. It was an indescribable feeling. As if nature was actually trying to nurture me.— Michel Faber
Protective of his gleaming domain, beavering away in it alone like an obsessed scientist in a humid and luridly lit laboratory.— Michel Faber
History indulges strange whims in the way it dresses its women.— Michel Faber
I never, ever want to be in a position where people are sitting round a table, saying, 'We've got this book. I don't really get it, but we paid for it, so we've got to sell it.' I'm not Tony Parsons; that's not right for me.— Michel Faber
But miracles are not for the asking; they come only when the stern eyes of God droop shut for a moment, and Our Lady takes advantage of His inattention to grant an illicit mercy. God ... is an Anglican, whereas Our Lady is of the True Faith; the two of Them have an uneasy relationship, unable to agree on anything, except that if They divorce, the Devil will leap gleefully into the breach.— Michel Faber
I strive to use references that may still make some kind of sense once our age has passed into history. That robs my writing of a certain connectedness to my time, but potentially might allow it to make sense to people who are not in this time.— Michel Faber
I joined an Internet community of Victorian scholars, which meant that if I posted a question about 1875's lavender harvest, more than a thousand experts would ponder it.— Michel Faber
Could indicate the cocky self-awareness of a male in prime condition.— Michel Faber
Shared suffering, she'd found, was no guarantee of intimacy.— Michel Faber
I got fed up with the human race, really. I got a very negative feeling about human potentials. And for a while, I thought I might write a book without any human beings in it whatsoever.— Michel Faber
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.— Michel Faber
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.— Michel Faber
The past was dwindling, like something shrinking to a speck in the rear-view mirror, and the future was shining through the windscreen, demanding her full attention.— Michel Faber
I am open-eyed about what poverty does to people.— Michel Faber
God, Agnes has decided, is an Anglican, whereas Our Lady is of the True Faith; the two of Them have an uneasy relationship, unable to agree on anything, except that if They divorce, the Devil will leap gleefully into the breach. So, They tolerate each other, and take care of the world as best They can. Moving— Michel Faber
When answering questions over the years about film and TV adaptations of my books, I have always maintained that no movie or TV series could ever change or damage my work.— Michel Faber
Isn't Heaven reward enough, without needing to see the damned punished?— Michel Faber
All sens of purpose, of responsibility, indeed of any imaginable future, were removed from her by the deaths of her husband and child. It was they who used to make her life a story, they who seemed to be giving it a beginning, a middle and an end. Nowadays, her life is more like a newspaper: aimless, up-to-date, full of meaningless events for Colonel Leek to recite when no one's paying attention. For all the use she is to Society, beyond intercepting the odd squirt of sperm that would otherwise have troubled a respectable wife, she might as well be dead. Yet, she exists, and, against the odds, she is happy.— Michel Faber
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.— Michel Faber
MERCY. It was a word she'd rarely encountered— Michel Faber
You one of those decaffeinated Christians, padre? The diabetic wafer? Doctrine-free, guilt-reduced, low in Last judgement, 100% less Second Coming, no added Armageddon? Might contain small traces of crucified Jew?— Michel Faber
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.— Michel Faber
Reassurance is such a sad, mad thing. Deep inside, everyone knows the truth.— Michel Faber
Peter's hands had ceased trembling. He had been granted perspective. This was not Gethsemane: he wasn't headed for Golgotha, he was embarking on a great adventure. He'd been chosen out of thousands, to pursue the most important missionary calling since the Apostles had ventured forth to conquer Rome with the power of love, and he was going to do his best.— Michel Faber
For years, I was quite a militant atheist. I wanted to burn down all the churches or turn them into second-hand record emporiums.— Michel Faber
Very few stories embody a human truth so definitively that we cannot think of the truth without remembering the story and cannot imagine how people ever got by without it.— Michel Faber
Why, the top-notch gentleman visits his hatter every few days just to have his hat ironed!— Michel Faber
The variety of shapes, colours and textures under her feet was, she believed, literally infinite. It must be. Each shell, each pebble, each stone had been made what it was by aeons of submarine or subglacial massage. The indiscriminate, eternal devotion of nature to its numberless particles had an emotional importance for Isserley; it put the unfairness of human life into perspective.— Michel Faber
Hey, non dispera! There is a way out. Come to beautiful Oasis. No crime, no madness, no bad stuff of any kind, a brand new home, home on the range, no or antelope but hey, accentuate the positive, there never is a discouraging word, nobody rapes you or tries to reminisce about Paris in the springtime, no sense sniffing that old vomit, right? Cut the strings, blank the slate, let go of Auschwitz and the Alamo and the ... the fucking Egyptians for God's sake, who needs it, who cares, focus on tomorrow. Onward and upward. Come to beautiful Oasis.— Michel Faber
Yes, seven years old she was, when she finally plucked up the courage to ask her mother what Christmas was all about, and Mrs Castaway replied (once only, after which the subject was forever forbidden): 'It's the day Jesus Christ died for our sins. Evidently unsuccessfully, since we're still paying for them.— Michel Faber
Before I was published, I thought men read car manuals or books about football. But once I started having really serious conversations with male lovers of literature, I let go of that prejudice.— Michel Faber
How's things, man?" The black man extended his hand for a handshake. Mathematical formulae were jotted on the sleeve of his shirt, right up to the elbow.— Michel Faber
"Very good," said Peter. It had never occurred to him before that dark-skinned people didn't have the option of jotting numbers on their skin. You learned something new about human diversity every day.
I'm still tremendously proud of 'Crimson Petal.' I'm still very emotionally involved with these characters. I still care about them.— Michel Faber
A single day spent doing things which fail to nourish the soul is a day stolen, mutilated, and discarded in the gutter of destiny.— Michel Faber
The word troubled her, though. 'Indispensable.' It was a word people tended to resort to when dispensability was in the air.— Michel Faber
Total oblivion is the fate of almost everything in this world. I'm very likely to suffer that same fate; my work will probably not be remembered, and if any of it is, if any of those novels is fated to be one of those novels that is still being read 50 or 100 years after it was written, I've probably already written it.— Michel Faber
By recycling pre-existing material, Shakespeare seemed to endorse a view common in his time, which has become even more entrenched in the 400 years since: that all the truly essential stories are already in the bag.— Michel Faber
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.— Michel Faber
When I was a kid, it was thought I would do something in the visual arts because I was always drawing, but when we emigrated to Australia from Holland when I was seven, I learnt the English language, and I fell in love with it.— Michel Faber
The walls shrugged themselves loose from their foundations and slid towards the centre of the room, as if attracted by the struggle. The ceiling, a massive rectangular slab of concrete furrowed with fluorescent white, also shuddered loose and loomed down on her.— Michel Faber
He ought to have conceded that she was a flower not destined to open, a hothouse creation, no less beautiful, no less woth having, He should have admired her, praised her and, at the close of day, let her be.— Michel Faber
I think there is that very basic yearning for something or someone to be looking after us, for there to be a framework holding the universe together that is benign and intelligent. We're not going to get rid of that; it's just too scary to be that molecule flying around briefly in a vacuum.— Michel Faber
All my novels are about people who strive to heal and evolve.— Michel Faber
Because I must do something while I still can. Each soul is still incalculably precious.— Michel Faber
I'm a loner and always have been.— Michel Faber
Their wealth makes them like a different creature, an exotic thing that doesn't have to function like a human.— Michel Faber
All along the street, keys rattle in key-holes as each shop's ornate metal clothing is stripped away ... It's as if, having unlocked the chastity of shutters and doors, they can't see the point in maintaining any shred of modesty.— Michel Faber
Behaving as if his actions didn't need defending. Typical rich kid, typical pampered little tycoon. None of their actions ever needed defending, did they?— Michel Faber
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.— Michel Faber
Modern politicians like Cameron dream of exerting paternal influence without being seen as paternalistic, of fostering moral behaviour without being considered moralistic.— Michel Faber
She couldn't quite believe it, even after all these years. It was a phenomenon of stupendous and unjustifiably useless extravagance. Yet here it lay, soft and powdery, edibly pure.— Michel Faber
Coincidences like that served as a reminder that, variations in pigment aside, humans were all part of the same species.— Michel Faber
Really good books need a chaos element: something weird or inexplicable.— Michel Faber
Most true things are kind of corny, don't you think? But we make them more sophisticated out of sheer embarrassment.— Michel Faber
One of Lucy's admirers took to her, apparently."— Michel Faber
"Took to her?" echoes William, his own feelings for Sugar causing him to construe the phrase benignly.
"Yes," said Bodley "With her own riding crop."
"Beat her very severely."
"Particularly about the face and mouth."
"I understand all the fight's gone out of her now."
"Well, as you can imagine," he says. "Madam Georgina doesn't have high hopes. Even if she's willing to wait, there will be scars."
Ashwell, eyes downcast, is picking at the lint on his trousers. "Poor girl," he laments.
"Yes," smirks Bodley. "How are the fighty maulen.
My affinity, as a novelist, with Dickens has been overstated. I relish the way everything in his prose pulsates with life force, and I'm in debt to him every time I invest inanimate objects with uncanny animism. But his female characters annoy me.— Michel Faber
Nowadays, her life is more like a newspaper: aimless, up-to-date and full of meaningless events— Michel Faber
ISSERLEY ALWAYS DROVE straight past a hitch-hiker when she first saw him, to give herself time to size him up. She was looking for big muscles: a hunk on legs. Puny, scrawny specimens were no use to her.— Michel Faber
Why was even the shallowest human conversation so fraught with pitfalls and tricky calibrations? Why couldn't people just keep silent until they had something essential to say, like the Oasans?— Michel Faber
Oh how she wondered, what she looked like to him, in his alien innocence.— Michel Faber
He thought about history, the hidden human anxieties behind momentous events. The tiny trivial things that were probably bothering Einstein or Darwin or Newton as they formulated their theories: arguments with the landlady, maybe, or concern over a blocked fireplace. The pilots who bombed Dresden, fretting over a phrase in a letter from back home: What did she mean by that? Or what about Columbus, when he was sailing toward the New Land ... who knows what was on his mind? The last words spoken to him by an old friend, perhaps, a person not even remembered in history books ...— Michel Faber
Only the other day, Robbie had gone to a terrible disco in Alness, hoping it would transform his life in some way.— Michel Faber
Most distracting of all, though, was not the threat of danger but the allure of beauty.— Michel Faber
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.— Michel Faber
Of course I know that the twins are only words on a page, and I'm certainly not the sort of writer who talks to his characters or harbours any illusions about the creative process. But at the same time, I think it's juvenile and arrogant when literary writers compulsively remind their readers that the characters aren't real. People know that already. The challenge is to make an intelligent reader suspend disbelief, to seduce them into the reality of a narrative.— Michel Faber
Men! Armchair heroes the lot of them, while women were sent out to do the dirty work.— Michel Faber
In 1978, when I was 17 and in my first year at university, I read approximately 3,500 pages of Dickens.— Michel Faber
William pouts irritably. Socialism is not the same thing as letting one's servants muddle towards anarchy. But never mind, never mind: on a day like today, it's not worth worrying over. Soon the servant question, at least in William Rackham's household, will be resolved beyond any ambiguity.— Michel Faber
Anyway," Peter continued. "I got the most amazing welcome. These people are desperate to learn about God!"— Michel Faber
"Well, ain't that a lick on the dick," said BG.
[ ... ] how can one sleep while dancing at the edge of waves?— Michel Faber
![Michel Faber Sayings By Michel Faber: [ ... ] how can one sleep while dancing at the edge of waves?](https://www.greatsayings.net/images/michel-faber-sayings-by-michel-faber-1210336.jpg "Michel Faber Sayings By Michel Faber: [ ... ] how can one sleep while dancing at the edge of waves?")
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.— Michel Faber
Belief was a place that people didn't leave until they absolutely must.— Michel Faber
There was a red button on the wall labelled EMERGENCY, but no button labelled BEWILDERMENT.— Michel Faber
Strange how a specimen like him, well cared for, healthy, free to roam the world, and blessed with a perfection of form which would surely have allowed him to breed with a greater selection of females than average, could still be so miserable. By contrast, other males, scarred by neglect, riddled with diseases, spurned by their kind, were occasionally known to radiate a contentment that seemed to arise from something more enigmatic than mere stupidity.— Michel Faber
Because human beings suffer so much more than ducks."— Michel Faber
"You might not think so if you were a duck.
My energies get used up quite quickly, and the psychic space I'm in when I write is a very lonely one, so I found that harder and harder to get back to.— Michel Faber
The highway looked different to him now, as they drove on. In theory it was the same stretch of tarmac, bounded by the same traffic paraphernalia and flimsy metal fences, but it had been transformed by their own intent. It was no longer a straight line to an airport, it was a mysterious hinterland of shadowy detours and hidey-holes. Proof, once again, that reality was not objective, but always waiting to be reshaped and redefined by one's attitude. Of course, everybody on earth had the power to reshape reality. It was one of the things Peter and Beatrice talked about a lot. The challenge of getting people to grasp that life was only as grim and confining as you perceived it to be. The challenge of getting people to see that the immutable facts of existence were not so immutable after all. The challenge of finding a simpler word for immutable than immutable.— Michel Faber
It was already tomorrow. She should have known from the beginning that it would end like this.— Michel Faber
Was it always the desirable ones that sat in silence, and the misshapen rejects that prattled away unprompted?— Michel Faber
