Edward St. Aubyn Quotes

47 Sourced Quotes

He liked slim books which he could slip into his overcoat pocket and leave there unread for months. What was the point of a book if you couldn't carry it around with you as a theoretical defence against boredom?

Edward St. Aubyn
No man is an island — although one's known a surprising number who own one.

Edward St. Aubyn
He had brought nothing to read except The Tibetan Book of the Dead, hoping to find its exotic iconography ridiculous enough to purge any fantasies he might still cling to about consciousness continuing after death.

Edward St. Aubyn
No pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too big if it's cherished.

Edward St. Aubyn
When she told people how nervous she was about any kind of public appearance, they said incredibly annoying things like, 'Don't forget to breathe.' Now she knew why.

Edward St. Aubyn
He marvelled again at the effect of projection: how hostile Henry had seemed to him when Patrick was hostile towards everyone; how considerate he seemed now that Patrick had no argument with him. What would it be like to stop projecting? Was it possible at all?

Edward St. Aubyn
No doubt his grandmother and his great-grandfather had hoped to empower a senator, enrich a great art collection or encourage a dazzling marriage, but in the end they had mainly subsidized idleness, drunkenness, treachery and divorce.

Edward St. Aubyn
The passage he was to read was from Revelations — or Obfuscations, as he preferred to call them. Reading it over on the train from Cambridge, he had felt a strange desire to build a time machine so that he could take the author a copy of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

Edward St. Aubyn
Without speech, thoughts plough on like a train without tracks, buckling, crashing, ripping everything apart.

Edward St. Aubyn
When a man of my father's wealth dies of cancer, you know they haven't found a cure.

Edward St. Aubyn
Above all, he wanted to stop being a child without using the cheap disguise of becoming a parent.

Edward St. Aubyn
As he laboured up to his bedsit, a miniature roof conversion with sloping walls on the fifth floor of a narrow Victorian building in Kensington, Patrick seemed to regress through evolutionary history, growing more stooped with each flight, until he was resting his knuckles on the carpet of the top landing, like an early hominid that has not yet learned to stand upright on the grasslands of Africa and only makes rare and nervous expeditions down from the safety of the trees.

Edward St. Aubyn
They said it was the only way to stop her running up debts, but the best way to stop her running up debts was to give her more money.

Edward St. Aubyn
What is a strain is being forced into the lobster pot of good behaviour while being forced to sing its praises.

Edward St. Aubyn
Mind you, I don't know why people get so fixated on happiness, which always eludes them, when there are so many other invigorating experiences available, like rage, jealousy, disgust, and so forth.

Edward St. Aubyn
What did this long-range goodwill mean, and what did it say about the social contract that allowed a rich man to free all of his descendents from the need to work over the course of almost two centuries?

Edward St. Aubyn
His decision to study the law had got him as far as hiring Twelve Angry Men from a video shop.

Edward St. Aubyn
In the eight years since his father's death, Patrick's youth had slipped away without being replaced by any signs of maturity, unless the tendency for sadness and exhaustion to eclipse hatred and insanity could be called 'mature'.

Edward St. Aubyn
Of course it was wrong to want to change people, but what else could you possibly want to do with them?

Edward St. Aubyn
The tragedy was that five or perhaps ten years of decent five-day-a-week analysis could have mitigated the problem significantly.

Edward St. Aubyn
Men used to tell me how they used butter for sex, now they tell me how they've eliminated it from their diet.

Edward St. Aubyn
All I can say is that the Great Barrier Reef is the most vulgar thing I've ever seen. It's one's worst nightmare, full of frightful loud colours, peacock blues, and impossible oranges all higgledy-piggledy while one's mask floods.

Edward St. Aubyn
Gothic script seemed to warp every letter that passed through the door of the funeral parlour, as if death were a German village.

Edward St. Aubyn
Mrs Hickmann was inclined to forgive Patrick the apparent purposelessness of his life and the sinister pallor of his complexion, when she considered that he has an income of one hundred thousand pounds a year, and came from a family which, although it had done nothing since, had seen the Norman invasion from the winning side.

Edward St. Aubyn
'Look at her,' said Patrick, 'pacing around the cage of her Valentino dress, longing to be released into her natural habitat.'

Edward St. Aubyn
But do you know what struck me, apart from Nancy's vibrant self-pity, which she had the nerve to pretend was grief?

Edward St. Aubyn
It was virtually impossible to think of a sentence that made a positive use of that dreadful word 'enough', let alone one that started raving about 'nothing'.

Edward St. Aubyn
The claim that every man kills the thing he loves seemed to him a wild guess compared with the near certainty of a man turning into the thing he hates.

Edward St. Aubyn
Quite recently, to his horror, he had realized he would have to get a job. He was therefore studying to become a barrister, in the hope that he would find some pleasure in keeping as many criminals as possible at large.

Edward St. Aubyn
The tragedy of old age, when a man's too weak to hit his own child.

Edward St. Aubyn