Sebastian Faulks Quotes

People often refer to bygone days as a simpler time. Perhaps, more accurately, my grandparents' generation focused better on what mattered. Traffic jams and minor quibbles with my husband Daniel pale in comparison with the worries that were faced on the home front and battlefield during the Second World War.

Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man's starving!

I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the Second World War.

When I was a kid, my mother used to feed me mashed-potato sandwiches, brussel sprout sandwiches; my brain cells were starving from lack of food. I'll eat anything. I'll eat dirt.

During the Second World War, evacuated to non-Jewish households, I encountered Christianity at home and in school.

I tried to use words that were dealing with the emotional quality that any human being could recognize in the way that they felt about their country. It's to do with the world we live in. That world is a brutal one and full of war. It's also full of many wonderful things and love and hope.

I can't think of a specific meal, but my favourite country for food has got to be France. I love those restaurants in the middle of the village squares.

France was an occupied country, a country that surrendered and was left without the right to choose.

I love Thanksgiving because it's a holiday that is centered around food and family, two things that are of utmost importance to me.

Norway was occupied by the Germans in the Second World War, and I've met a lot of people who had to live through that occupation in varying degrees.

You don't have to have fought in a war to love peace.

Anyone who's traveled with me to Afghanistan knows why I love this book: 'War,' by Sebastian Junger.

If you will remember history correctly, even the Second World War was perpetrated by a stateless actor, by murdering the Prince Rudolf, if you remember. And so is the case with 9/11. It was a stateless actor which has made the world go to war.

All my grandparents and great aunts and uncle love 'Foyle's War.' They all lived through the war and love to see it reconstructed so authentically.

I've read pretty broadly on the Holocaust - both fiction and non-fiction - and to me, 'The Lost Wife' is one of the best. The horrors of war serve as a backdrop to a love affair that spans a lifetime, and that love story stayed with me long after I put down the book.

Never fight someone who is more willing to die than you are.

Lest I keep my complacent ways I must remind myself.. Someone out there died for me today As long as there is war.. I ask and I must answer.. Was I worth dying for?

People ate all their beasts of burden, and the Caliph had only three horses left. Next they set on their dogs and cats. Finally…people began to eat human flesh…Men stood on their terraces and caught passersby using hooks on the end of ropes.

If the blood of France and of Germany flows again, as it did twenty-five years ago, in a longer and even more murderous war, each of the two peoples will fight with confidence in its own victory, but the most certain victors will be the forces of destruction and barbarism.

It’s a phoney war

A starving man thinks first of satisfying his hunger before anything else. He will sell his liberty and all for the sake of getting a morsel of food.

When I am dead and opened, you shall find Calais lying in my heart.

We’ll all fight like cats – or die rather than submit to Hitler. U.S. look pretty useless. Well, we must die without them.

In wartime the herd instinct rise …

It was in the early spring of 1871 when we entered Paris in one of the first trains that had arrived in that city since the suppression of the Commune. It was dark when we detrained and when we asked for a cab we were laughed at; the porter asked of what use a cab would be since all the horses had been eaten. We were also told that all the famous hotels whose names we remembered had been converted into hospitals.