Quotes from Edward St. Aubyn

Oh Jesus, thought Patrick, let me out of here. He imagined himself disappearing through the floor with a shovel and some bunk-bed slats, the theme music of The Great Escape humming in the air. He was crawling under the crematorium through fragile tunnels, when he felt himself being dragged backwards by Annette's maddening voice.

To a foreign eye, America has so much philanthropy and so little charity. Most people have to kill themselves to prove that they deserve ordinary kindness, while a tiny group of people never stop boasting about how generous they are – as long as it's tax-deductible.

And then the old exhortations would come out: observe everything…trust nobody…despise your mother…effort is vulgar…things were better in the eighteenth century.

the two men left the building with a sense of achievement, counterbalanced by desire.

psychopathy of surgeons; the most audacious and godlike healers, who were also the only group of people encouraged to slice open human bodies, saw off limbs, cut out flesh, remove organs and excise brain tissue, operating at the edge of paralysis, stroke and haemorrhage. It was a profession that seemed to fuse compassion and brutality, without having to reveal which was the dominant impulse, as long as both were accompanied by a high degree of precision.

Despite all their rooftop antics, the only proposition they really had to offer was that luck multiplied by time transubstantiated matter.

He was an inconsolable wreck. He couldn't live with so much doubt and so much intensity. He vomited colostrum over his mother and then in the hazy moment of emptiness that followed, he caught sight of the curtains bulging with light. They held his attention. That's how it worked here. They fascinated you with things to make you forget about the separation.

She always said, 'I know you like this,' which was a lie, because he had told her he didn't the last time.

They laughed the innocent laughter of two snobs taking a holiday from that need to appear tolerant and open-minded which marred what Nicholas still called 'modern life,' although he had never known any other kind.

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

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

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.

Surely: the adverb of a man without an argument.

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.

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

How could he think his way out of the problem when the problem was the way he thought...

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.

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?

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

This time he was going to fall apart silently.

We are entering the Dark Ages, my friend, but this time there will be lots of neon, and screen savers, and street lighting.

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.

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

He was just one of those Englishmen who was always saying silly things to sound less pompous, and pompous things to sound less silly.