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.

— Edward St Aubyn

Edward St Aubyn Quotes

Why was he in this state? Or perhaps the question was why had he not always been in this state? Why had he not always found life so disturbing and so poignant?

— Edward St Aubyn

Unlike the riotous appetites of adolescence, his present cravings had a tragic tinge, they were cravings for the appetites, metacravings, wanting to want.

— Edward St Aubyn

The way other people felt about love, he felt about heroin, and he felt about love the way other people felt about heroin: that it was a dangerous and incomprehensible waste of time.

— Edward St Aubyn

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.

— Edward St Aubyn

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.

— Edward St Aubyn

The leafless trees, with their black branches stretched hysterically in every direction, looked to him like illustrations of a central nervous system racked by disease: studies of human suffering anatomized against the winter sky.

— Edward St Aubyn

If they made a film of my inner life, it would be more than the public could take. Mothers would scream, “Bring back The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so we can have some decent family entertainment!

— Edward St Aubyn

But that’s what the English mean, isn’t it, when they say, “He was very philosophical about it”? They mean that someone stopped thinking about something.

— Edward St Aubyn

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

— Edward St Aubyn

The drive rose sharply to the left of the steps to a circle of flat ground where her maroon Buick was parked under an umbrella pine. It looked preposterous, stretched out on its white-walled tyres against the terraced vines and olive groves behind it, but to Eleanor her car was like a consulate in a strange city, and she moved towards it with the urgency of a robbed tourist.

— Edward St Aubyn

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.

— Edward St Aubyn

So much road and so few places, so much friendliness and so little intimacy, so much flavour and so little taste.

— Edward St Aubyn

Once he had taken heroin he could imagine being without it;.

— Edward St Aubyn

The past has all the time in the world. It’s only the future which is running out.

— Edward St. Aubyn

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

— 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.

— Edward St. Aubyn

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

— Edward St. Aubyn

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

— Edward St. Aubyn

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

— Edward St. Aubyn

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.

— Edward St. Aubyn
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