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Edward St. Aubyn QUOTES

Edward St. Aubyn QUOTES

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

― Edward St. Aubyn

2 " There seemed to be no one in a position of power, from the Vatican to Wall Street, from Parliament to Scotland Yard to Fleet Street, who could think of anything better to do than abuse it.... "

― Edward St. Aubyn , Lost for Words

3 " The measure of a work of art is how much art it has in it, not how much ‘relevance’. Relevant to whom? Relevant to what? Nothing is more ephemeral than a hot topic. "

― Edward St. Aubyn , Lost for Words

4 " People never remember happiness with the care that they lavish on preserving every detail of their suffering. "

― Edward St. Aubyn

5 " An editor sleeping with his writer was not as bad as a psychoanalyst sleeping with his patient, or even a professor sleeping with an undergraduate, let alone a president with an intern. "

― Edward St. Aubyn , Lost for Words

6 " Old enough to remember the arrival of 'Have a nice day', Patrick could only look with alarm on the hyperinflation of 'Have a great one'. Where would this Weimar of bullying cheerfulness end? 'You have a profound and meaningful day now. "

― Edward St. Aubyn , Mother's Milk (Patrick Melrose, #4)

7 " If anything should take place behind closed doors, it was cruelty and betrayal. "

― Edward St. Aubyn , Lost for Words

8 " An image flashed across her mind of two rams flinging their heads against each other on a rocky mountainside. What did the girl rams do? Faint with pleasure? Clap their cloven hooves? Lean against some nearby boulders, with little tubs of mountain grass, discussing the battle? "

― Edward St. Aubyn , Lost for Words

9 " His conscience, like a sunburnt scorpion, was stinging itself to death. "

― Edward St. Aubyn

10 " Was he, after all, really a bad man doing a brilliant impersonation of an idiot? It was hard to tell. The connections between stupidity and malice were so tangled and so dense. "

― Edward St. Aubyn , Mother's Milk (Patrick Melrose, #4)

11 " 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

12 " He found her pretty in a bewildered, washed-out way, but it was her restlessness that aroused him, the quiet exasperation of a woman who longs to throw herself into something significant, but cannot find what it is. "

― Edward St. Aubyn , The Patrick Melrose Novels

13 " Surely: the adverb of a man without an argument. "

― Edward St. Aubyn , Bad News (Patrick Melrose, #2)

14 " 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.” - Some Hope "

― Edward St. Aubyn , Some Hope (Patrick Melrose, #3)

15 " At the beginning, there had been talk of using some of her money to start a home for alcoholics. In a sense they had succeeded. "

― Edward St. Aubyn , Never Mind (Patrick Melrose, #1)

16 " No, he mustn't think about it, or indeed about anything, and especially not about heroin, because heroin was the one thing that really worked, the only thing that stopped him scampering around in a hamster's wheel of unanswerable questions. Heroin was the cavalry. Heroin was the missing chair leg, made with such precision that it matched every splinter of the break. Heroin landed purring at the base of his skull, and wrapped itself darkly around his nervous system, like a black cat curling up on its favourite cushion. It was as soft and rich as the throat of a wood pigeon, or the splash of sealing wax onto a page, or a handful of gems slipping from palm to palm. "

― Edward St. Aubyn , Bad News (Patrick Melrose, #2)

17 " It seems people spend the majority of their lives believing they're dying, with the only consolation being that at one point they get to be right. "

― Edward St. Aubyn , Patrick Melrose Volume 1: Never Mind, Bad News and Some Hope (Patrick Melrose #1-3)

18 " What could he do but accept the disturbing extent to which memory was fictional and hope that the fiction lay at the service of a truth less richly represented by the original facts? "

― Edward St. Aubyn , The Patrick Melrose Novels

19 " In my rather brief medical practice,' said David modestly, 'I found that people spend their whole lives imagining they are about to die. Their only consolation is that one day they're right. "

― Edward St. Aubyn , Never Mind (Patrick Melrose, #1)

20 " You can only give things up once they start to let you down. "

― Edward St. Aubyn , The Patrick Melrose Novels