“Shared suffering, she’d found, was no guarantee of intimacy.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin
“Most distracting of all, though, was not the threat of danger but the allure of beauty.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin
“The word troubled her, though. ‘Indispensable.’ It was a word people tended to resort to when dispensability was in the air.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin
“she and they were all the same under the skin, weren’t they?”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin
“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, quote from Under the Skin
“In the end, though, vodsels couldn't do any of the things that really defined a human being. They couldn't siuwil, the couldn't mesnishtil,they had no concept of slan.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin
“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, quote from Under the Skin
“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, quote from Under the Skin
“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, quote from Under the Skin
“They both sat in silence for the rest of the journey, as if conscious of having let each other down.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin
“I sometimes think that the only things really worth talking about are the things people absolutely refuse to discuss.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin
“MERCY. It was a word she’d rarely encountered”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin
“Nothing happened, and time stubbornly refused to pass.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin
“it was already tomorrow. She should have known from the beginning that it would end like this.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin
“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, quote from Under the Skin
“Isserley walked along the path the generations of sheep-flocks had made, up the tiers of the hill. In her mind, she was already”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin
“Unreality was swirling all around her like the delirious miasmas”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin
“The indiscriminate, eternal devotion of nature to its numberless particles had an emotional importance for Isserley; it put the”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin
“was a female. Isserley wasn’t interested in females, at least not in that way. Let them get picked up by someone else. If the hitcher was male, she usually went back for another look, unless he was an obvious weakling. Assuming he’d made a reasonable impression on her,”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin
“oh how she wondered, what she looked like to him, in his alien innocence.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin
“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, quote from Under the Skin
“protective of his gleaming domain, beavering away in it alone like an obsessed scientist in a humid and luridly lit laboratory.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin
“Vess Incorporated had simply dug them out of one hole and buried them in another”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin
“could indicate the cocky self-awareness of a male in prime condition.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin
“Well, I did my best,' said Amlis, in a self-deprecating purr. 'But I can tell when a challenge is hopeless. Anyway, it's not your minds I need to change.' And he glanced round at the contents of the ship's hull, acknowledging the scale of the slaughter and its commercial purpose.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin
“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, quote from Under the Skin
“Her invisible remains would combine, over time, with all the wonders under the sun. When it snowed she would be part of it, falling softly to earth, rising up again with the snow's evaporation, When it rained, she would be there in the spectral arch that spanned from firth to ground. She would help to wreathe the fields in mists, and yet would always be transparent to the stars. She would live forever.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin
“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, quote from Under the Skin
Michel Faber
Born place: in The Hague, Netherlands
Born date April 13, 1960
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“The roots of war are in the way we live our daily lives -- the way we develop our industries, build up our society, and consume goods.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, quote from Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life
“The alley is a pitch for about twenty women leaning in doorways, chain-smoking. In their shiny open raincoats, short skirts, cheap boots, and high-heeled shoes they watch the street with hooded eyes, like spies in a B movie. Some are young and pretty, and some are older, and some of them are very old, with facial expressions ranging from sullen to wry. Most of the commerce is centred on the slightly older women, as if the majority of the clients prefer experience and worldliness. The younger, prettier girls seem to do the least business, apparent innocence being only a minority preference, much as it is for the aging crones in the alley who seem as if they’ve been standing there for a thousand years.
In the dingy foyer of the hotel is an old poster from La Comédie Française, sadly peeling from the all behind the desk. Cyrano de Bergerac, it proclaims, a play by Edmond Rostand. I will stand for a few moments to take in its fading gaiety. It is a laughing portrait of a man with an enormous nose and a plumed hat. He is a tragic clown whose misfortune is his honour. He is a man entrusted with a secret; an eloquent and dazzling wit who, having successfully wooed a beautiful woman on behalf of a friend cannot reveal himself as the true author when his friend dies. He is a man who loves but is not loved, and the woman he loves but cannot reach is called Roxanne.
That night I will go to my room and write a song about a girl. I will call her Roxanne. I will conjure her unpaid from the street below the hotel and cloak her in the romance and the sadness of Rostand’s play, and her creation will change my life.”
― Sting, quote from Broken Music
“Helena: Will they be happier when they can feel pain?
Dr. Gall: On the contrary. But they will be technically more perfect.”
― Karel Čapek, quote from R.U.R.
“On the other hand, mere critical thinking, without creative and intuitive insights, without the search for new patterns, is sterile and doomed. To solve complex problems in changing circumstances requires the activity of both cerebral hemispheres: the path to the future lies through the corpus callosum.”
― Carl Sagan, quote from Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence
“She thinks of James Grierson. His Kisses tasted like whiskey, and they landed right and true.”
― Alden Bell, quote from The Reapers are the Angels
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