Sebastian Faulks

thumb| Sebastian Charles Faulks (born 20 April 1953) is a British novelist, journalist and broadcaster. He is most notable for his historical novels set in France – The Girl at the Lion d'Or, Birdsong and Charlotte Gray. Quotes The essential change seemed to her quite simple: bankers had detached their activities from the real world. Instead of being a “service” industry—helping companies who had a function in the life of their society—banking became a closed system. Profit was no longer related to growth or increase, but became self-sustaining; and in this semivirtual world, the amount of money to be made by financiers also became unhitched from normal logic. A Week in December (London: Hutchinson, 2009), p. 102 Birdsong (1993) Citations are from the 1994 Vintage paperback, 0-09-938791-3, which is out of print. thumb| Jack already immune to death, let their white faces drift from his memory. p. 125 It is as though you stop living. Your mind goes dead. p. 136 He spoke no French and viewed all buildings, fields and churches as profoundly alien. p. 141 He blamed the NCOs, who blamed the officers; they swore at the staff officers who blamed the Generals. p. 141 He depended on the resilience of certain men to nerve himself to his unnatural life. p. 142 Perhaps in some way he did not understand, that was what the two officers had been doing: perhaps all that talk about life-drawing was just a way of pretending everything was normal. p. 142 This is not a war. It is an exploration of how far men can be degraded. p. 150 Although he had little idea of time, the burned images of the preceding days lived in his memory with static clarity. p. 157 What had taken place beneath that placid irregular roof seemed to belong to a world as peculiar and abnormal as the one in which he now lived. p. 158 Stephen was moved by the thought of his fellow countrymen fighting this foreign war. p. 161 I don’t value my life enough. p. 164 But their breathing and their hearts worked as though one body. p. 168 He was surprised by his own brutality, he assumed that it was caused by fear. p. 172 The empty expressions that filled so many letters home did not seem to describe the part that Stephen had played in his life. p. 184 Stephen was appalled by the idea of being separated from the men he had fought with. He despised the war, but could not leave until he had seen it through until the end. p. 190 He wanted to answer them with steel and explosives, with metal tearing into soft tissue and spinning on the bone. When the war was over there would be a place for contemplation, even generosity, but in the meantime he treasured his hatred as a means of saving his own life and those of his men. p. 197 The place from which the boy had came was not just a better place but a better world. p. 198 They were breaking free into the darkness of normality, with food and drink, the sound of women and the sight of men whose first thought would not be to kill them. p. 201 There was only violent death or life to chose between; finer distinctions such as love, preference or kindness were redundant. p. 203 And a recent one [food parcel] addressed to Wilkinson, some weeks dead had been a cause of particular celebration. p. 212 For a moment he was baffled. It seemed to have no agricultural purpose, there was no planting or ploughing to be done. Then he realised, they were digging a mass grave. p. 215 Any man shirking his duty would be shot on the spot. p. 216 Poor Fritz. He must be mad by now under those guns. p. 218 Non-believers finding faith in fear. p. 219 Once more in ragged suicidal line. They trudged towards the pattering death of mounted guns. p. 232 Still, the more sardonic they became, the more he cared for them. Still he could not quite believe them, he could not comprehend the lengths to which they allowed themselves to be driven. p. 282 If they could shout loud enough they might bring the world back to it's senses, they might laugh loud enough to raise the dead. p. 344 I feel guilty that I have survived when all the others are gone. p. 390 Shells will fall on the reserve lines and we will not stop talking. p. 421 No child or future generation will know what this was like. p. 422 His own [childhood] seemed so long ago that it was as is someone had lived it for him. p. 425 He could remember this compassion but he no longer felt it. p. 440 There would be some decorum in their dying beneath the country they had fought so long to protect. p. 449 There was a perverse appeal in the thought he could complete what no enemy had managed. p. 450 We’ve all gone now. The whole of our little group. p. 455 They mocked him for still being alive. p. 455 It made him laugh, mad-eyed and bearded, like a hermit in his cave. p. 464 External links Category:1953 births Category:Living people Category:Novelists from England Category:Historical novelists Category:Journalists from England Category:University of Cambridge alumni Category:Commanders of the Order of the British Empire Category:Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature