Edward St Aubyn

Quotes

1. What is a strain is being forced into the lobster pot of good behaviour while being forced to sing its praises.

2. 

   All I can say is that the Great Barrier Reef is the most vulgar thing I’ve ever seen. It’s one’s worst nightmare, full of frightful loud colours, peacock blues, and impossible oranges all higgledy-piggledy while one’s mask floods.

3. 

   ‘Aren’t people funny? I don’t find where one sits at dinner fascinating at all,’ lied the Princess.

4. 

   Men used to tell me how they used butter for sex, now they tell me how they’ve eliminated it from their diet.

5. 

   The claim that every man kills the thing he loves seemed to him a wild guess compared with the near certainty of a man turning into the thing he hates.

6. 

   In the eight years since his father’s death, Patrick’s youth had slipped away without being replaced by any signs of maturity, unless the tendency for sadness and exhaustion to eclipse hatred and insanity could be called ‘mature’.

7. 

   Patrick imagined Kay’s father sunk in the back of the car, his eyes glazed over with exhaustion and his lungs, like torn fishing nets, trawling vainly for air.

8. 

   Above all, he wanted to stop being a child without using the cheap disguise of becoming a parent.

9. 

   There could be no negotiation between people who thought that cocaine was a vaguely naughty and salacious drug and the intravenous addict who know that it was an opportunity to experience the arctic landscape of pure terror.

10. 

    No man is an island — although one’s known a surprising number who own one.

11. 

    When a man of my father’s wealth dies of cancer, you know they haven’t found a cure.

That’s all the quotes.

11 quotes in the collection · come back when we add more