Quotes from Edward St. Aubyn

The Park's nice,' his father conceded, 'but the rest of the country is just people in huge cars wondering what to eat next.

David dropped the hose on the gravel path, thinking how useless to him Eleanor had become. She had been rigid with terror for too long. It was like trying to palpate a patient's swollen liver when one had already proved that it hurt. She could only be persuaded to relax so often.

And nothing gave him more faith in the existence of an afterlife than the inexorable sarcasm of fate .

And my heart is a handful of dust, / And the wheels go over my head, / And my bones are shaken with pain, / For into a shallow grave they are thrust, / Only a yard beneath the street,' something, something, 'enough to drive one mad.

He knew that she could not help him unravel the knot of inarticulacy that he carried inside him. Instead, he could feel it tightening, like a promise of suffocation that shadowed every breath he took.

The mess that's emerging...at least reflects the truth of my experience, the fact that every contemplation is interrupted, and that every interruption becomes further object of contemplation, and that this rhythm of delusion and revelation feels as if it's essential to the nature of consciousness considering itself.

He knew as deeply as he knew anything that sedation was the prelude to anxiety, stimulation the prelude to exhaustion and consolation the prelude to disappointment, and so he lay on the red velvet sofa and did nothing to distract himself from the news of his mother's death.

a genius of savoir faire

Talking of 'letting go of a lot of stuff,' his father handed the phrase back to Seamus, held by the corner like someone else's used handkerchief....

If an artist is good, nobody else can do what he or she does and therefore all comparisons are incoherent. Only the mediocre, pushing forward a commonplace view of life in a commonplace language, can really be compared, but my wife thinks that least mediocre of the mediocre is a discouraging title for a prize[.]

She liked the feeling that Maine was basically inhospitable, that it would soon shake out its summer visitors, like a dog on a beach.

No pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too small if it's cherished

Other people knew what they were meant to say, knew what they were meant to mean, and other people still - otherer people - knew what the other people meant when they said it.

Most people either felt regret at staying with someone for too long, or regret at losing them too easily. I manage to feel both ways at the same time about the same object.

It was as if every time she played the ace of spades, it was beaten by a small trump.

forced to observe the fringes of unconsciousness and make darkness visible;

The next thing that happened was that he forgot the last thing that happened.

There was no satisfaction in betraying people who had already defected.

Patrick had a fervent desire to be left alone matched only by his fervent desire not to be left alone.

He had to have her, he definitely had to have her. She was not merely the latest object on which his greedy desire to be saved had fixed itself; no, she was the woman who was going to save him. The woman whose fine intelligence and deep sympathy and divine body, yes, whose divine body would successfully deflect his attention from the gloomy well shaft of his feelings and the contemplation of his past.

He had become so caught up in building sentences that he had almost forgotten the barbaric days when thinking was like a splash of color landing on a page.

The Park's nice,' his father conceded, 'but the rest of the country is just people in huge cars wondering what to eat next.

A celebrity these days is somebody you've never heard of

Presumably those who enjoyed inflicting cruelty could hardly believe their luck and set about popularizing the superstition that their victims could only achieve peace of mind by forgiving them.' 'You