Edward St Aubyn Quotes
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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?
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When a man of my father’s wealth dies of cancer, you know they haven’t found a cure.
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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.
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The tragedy was that five or perhaps ten years of decent five-day-a-week analysis could have mitigated the problem significantly.
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Death was kind of a boisterous egomaniac that needed no encouragement.
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Of course it was wrong to want to change people, but what else could you possibly want to do with them?
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It must be hard to be exclusively social and entirely friendless at the same time.
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In the eight years since his father’s death, Patrick’s youth had slipped away without being replaced by any signs of maturity, unless the tendency for sadness and exhaustion to eclipse hatred and insanity could be called ‘mature’.
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The tragedy of old age, when a man’s too weak to hit his own child.
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More./What for? was a rhyme that deserved to be made more often.
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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.
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But do you know what struck me, apart from Nancy’s vibrant self-pity, which she had the nerve to pretend was grief?
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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.
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When she told people how nervous she was about any kind of public appearance, they said incredibly annoying things like, ‘Don’t forget to breathe.’ Now she knew why.
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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.
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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?
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Gothic script seemed to warp every letter that passed through the door of the funeral parlour, as if death were a German village.
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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.
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Men used to tell me how they used butter for sex, now they tell me how they’ve eliminated it from their diet.
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He marvelled again at the effect of projection: how hostile Henry had seemed to him when Patrick was hostile towards everyone; how considerate he seemed now that Patrick had no argument with him. What would it be like to stop projecting? Was it possible at all?
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Never use a conditional tense when it comes to money.
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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’.
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His decision to study the law had got him as far as hiring Twelve Angry Men from a video shop.
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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.