Edward St. Aubyn: Trending quotes (page 2)

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

“Death was kind of a boisterous egomaniac that needed no encouragement.”

“Look at her,’ said Patrick, ‘pacing around the cage of her Valentino dress, longing to be released into her natural habitat.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“When a man of my father’s wealth dies of cancer, you know they haven’t found a cure.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Of course it was wrong to want to change people, but what else could you possibly want to do with them?”

“Only in a country free from the funnelling of primogeniture and the levelling of égalité could the fifth generation of a family still be receiving parcels of wealth from a fortune that had essentially been made in the 1830s.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The tragedy of old age, when a man’s too weak to hit his own child.”

“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?”

“But do you know what struck me, apart from Nancy’s vibrant self-pity, which she had the nerve to pretend was grief?”

“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?”