Edward St. Aubyn: Trending quotes

“Without speech, thoughts plough on like a train without tracks, buckling, crashing, ripping everything apart.”

“Everything was usual. That was depression: being stuck, clinging to an out-of-date version of oneself.”

“No pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too big if it's cherished.”

“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.”

“It must be hard to be exclusively social and entirely friendless at the same time.”

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

“No man is an island — although one’s known a surprising number who own one.”

“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?”

“Men used to tell me how they used butter for sex, now they tell me how they’ve eliminated it from their diet.”

“Above all, he wanted to stop being a child without using the cheap disguise of becoming a parent.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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’.”

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

“What is a strain is being forced into the lobster pot of good behaviour while being forced to sing its praises.”

“More./What for? was a rhyme that deserved to be made more often.”

“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.”