Edward St. Aubyn Quotes

47 Sourced Quotes

'Aren't people funny? I don't find where one sits at dinner fascinating at all,' lied the Princess.

Edward St. Aubyn
More./What for? was a rhyme that deserved to be made more often.

Edward St. Aubyn
Patrick imagined Kay's father sunk in the back of the car, his eyes glazed over with exhaustion and his lungs, like torn fishing nets, trawling vainly for air.

Edward St. Aubyn
Never use a conditional tense when it comes to money.

Edward St. Aubyn
Unless in fact he had a very dim memory of her and the photograph had blown on the tiny little ember of his connection with his granny, like a faint orange glow in a heap of soft grey ash, and for a moment he really could remember when he had sat on his granny's lap and smiled at her and patted her wrinkly old face — his mother said he smiled at her and she was really pleased.

Edward St. Aubyn
And then he looked down at his fallen opponent, sprawled heavily on the carpet, and somehow the sight of his old neck, no longer festooned with an expensive black silk tie, but wrinkled and sagging and open at the throat, as if waiting for the final dagger thrust, filled him with pity and renewed his respect for the conservative powers of an ego that would rather kill its owner than allow him to change.

Edward St. Aubyn
Were the ironies of taxation any better: raising money for schools and hospitals and roads and bridges, and spending it on blowing up schools and hospitals and roads and bridges in self-defeating wars?

Edward St. Aubyn
It must be hard to be exclusively social and entirely friendless at the same time.

Edward St. Aubyn
Johnny stopped and leaned over, partly from curiosity, but also to disguise the fact that his sexual efforts could not compete with the mention of such a large sum of money.

Edward St. Aubyn
There could be no negotiation between people who thought that cocaine was a vaguely naughty and salacious drug and the intravenous addict who know that it was an opportunity to experience the arctic landscape of pure terror.

Edward St. Aubyn
As a guest, Emily Price had three main drawbacks: she was incapable of saying please, incapable of saying thank you and incapable of saying sorry, all the while creating a surge in the demand for these expressions.

Edward St. Aubyn
She glimpsed the pink flowers of a magnolia protesting against the black-and-white half-timbered facade of a mock-Tudor side street.

Edward St. Aubyn
The idea that an afterlife had been invented to reassure people who couldn't face the finality of death was no more plausible than the idea that the finality of death had been invented to reassure people who couldn't face the nightmare of endless experience.

Edward St. Aubyn
Death was kind of a boisterous egomaniac that needed no encouragement.

Edward St. Aubyn
Thank goodness there were people who were happy with nothing, thought Julia, so that people like her (and everyone else she had ever met), could have more.

Edward St. Aubyn
Looks didn't last forever and she wasn't ready for religion yet. Money was kind of a good compromise, staked up somewhere between cosmetics and eternity.

Edward St. Aubyn
How nauseating, thought Nicholas, a Jew being sentimental on behalf of a Negro: you lucky fellows, you've got plenty o' nuthin', whereas we're weighted down with all this international capital and these wretched Broadway musical hits.

Edward St. Aubyn