# Quote — Edward St Aubyn, At Last

> As he laboured up to his bedsit, a miniature roof conversion with sloping walls on the fifth floor of a narrow Victorian building in Kensington, Patrick seemed to regress through evolutionary history, growing more stooped with each flight, until he was resting his knuckles on the carpet of the top landing, like an early hominid that has not yet learned to stand upright on the grasslands of Africa and only makes rare and nervous expeditions down from the safety of the trees.

- Author: [Edward St Aubyn](https://www.leafyquotes.com/edward-st-aubyn.md)
- Book: [At Last](https://www.leafyquotes.com/edward-st-aubyn/at-last.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edward_St._Aubyn#Chapter_14) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/edward-st-aubyn/at-last/as-he-laboured

## More from this book

> Unless in fact he had a very dim memory of her and the photograph had blown on the tiny little ember of his connection with his granny, like a faint orange glow in a heap of soft grey ash, and for a moment he really could remember when he had sat on his granny’s lap and smiled at her and patted her wrinkly old face — his mother said he smiled at her and she was really pleased.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/edward-st-aubyn/at-last/unless-in-fact.md)

> 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.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/edward-st-aubyn/at-last/when-she-told.md)

> No doubt his grandmother and his great-grandfather had hoped to empower a senator, enrich a great art collection or encourage a dazzling marriage, but in the end they had mainly subsidized idleness, drunkenness, treachery and divorce.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/edward-st-aubyn/at-last/no-doubt-his.md)