Edward St Aubyn

Quotes

1. More./What for? was a rhyme that deserved to be made more often.

2. 

   Death was kind of a boisterous egomaniac that needed no encouragement.

3. 

   But do you know what struck me, apart from Nancy’s vibrant self-pity, which she had the nerve to pretend was grief?

4. 

   Never use a conditional tense when it comes to money.

5. 

   He had brought nothing to read except The Tibetan Book of the Dead, hoping to find its exotic iconography ridiculous enough to purge any fantasies he might still cling to about consciousness continuing after death.

6. 

   It must be hard to be exclusively social and entirely friendless at the same time.

7. 

   The passage he was to read was from Revelations — or Obfuscations, as he preferred to call them. Reading it over on the train from Cambridge, he had felt a strange desire to build a time machine so that he could take the author a copy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

8. 

   What did this long-range goodwill mean, and what did it say about the social contract that allowed a rich man to free all of his descendents from the need to work over the course of almost two centuries?

9. 

   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.

10. 

    He marvelled again at the effect of projection: how hostile Henry had seemed to him when Patrick was hostile towards everyone; how considerate he seemed now that Patrick had no argument with him. What would it be like to stop projecting? Was it possible at all?

11. 

    The tragedy was that five or perhaps ten years of decent five-day-a-week analysis could have mitigated the problem significantly.

12. 

    The idea that an afterlife had been invented to reassure people who couldn’t face the finality of death was no more plausible than the idea that the finality of death had been invented to reassure people who couldn’t face the nightmare of endless experience.