Edward St Aubyn Quotes

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

Looks didn’t last forever and she wasn’t ready for religion yet. Money was kind of a good compromise, staked up somewhere between cosmetics and eternity.

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.

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

His decision to study the law had got him as far as hiring Twelve Angry Men from a video shop.

Of course it was wrong to want to change people, but what else could you possibly want to do with them?

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’.

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.

The tragedy of old age, when a man’s too weak to hit his own child.

How nauseating, thought Nicholas, a Jew being sentimental on behalf of a Negro: you lucky fellows, you’ve got plenty o’ nuthin’, whereas we’re weighted down with all this international capital and these wretched Broadway musical hits.

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.

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

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.

Only in a country free from the funnelling of primogeniture and the levelling of égalité could the fifth generation of a family still be receiving parcels of wealth from a fortune that had essentially been made in the 1830s.

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