Edward St Aubyn citations

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 That was depression: being stuck, clinging to an out-of-date version of oneself.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”