Quotes from Edward St. Aubyn

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

Was this the triumph of self-knowledge: to suffer more lucidly?

Every paradise demands a serpent.

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.

The shock of standing again under the wide pale sky, completely exposed. This must be what the oyster feels when the lemon juice falls.

After less than a year together they now slept in separate rooms because Victor's snoring, and nothing else about him, kept her awake at night.

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.

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

At the same time, his past lay before him like a corpse waiting to be embalmed.

the waiting-room atmosphere in which death was the delayed train...

Personally I think that competition should be encouraged in war and sport and business, but that it makes no sense in the arts. If an artist is good, nobody else can do what he or she does and therefore all comparisons are incoherent.

But that, after all, was the point of romantic folly. If it hadn't all gone horribly wrong, it wouldn't have been the real thing.

There could be no real dialogue between those who still thought that time was on their side and those who realized that they were dangling from its jaws, like Saturn's children, already half-devoured.

What was the thread that held together the scattered beads of experience if not the pressure of interpretation? The meaning of life was whatever meaning one could thrust down its reluctant throat.

People think they are individuals because they use the word ''I'' so often.

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?

I find everything boring, therefore I'm fascinating.

Classically, the patient went into psychotherapy because she was neurotic from the suppression of her perverse desires, now she goes into psychotherapy because she is guilty about not enjoying her perverse desires.

I'll let you in on a little secret, Garry: everything is history. By the time you notice it, it's already happened. That famous imposter, the present, disappears in the cognitive gap. Mind the gap!

experience of love is that you get excited thinking that someone can mend your broken heart, and then you get angry when you realize that they can't. A certain economy creeps into the process and the jewelled daggers that used to pierce one's heart are replaced by ever-blunter penknives.

Cruelty is the opposite of love,' said Patrick, 'not just some inarticulate version of it.

No, no, I just meant…' Patrick felt he was coming from too many directions at once.

They had drifted apart, as people do when they promise to stay in touch; the ones who are going to stay in touch don't need to promise.

What if memories were just memories, without any consolatory or persecutory power? Would they exist at all, or was it always emotional pressure that summoned images from what was potentially all of experience so far?