104 Quotes by Edward St Aubyn

In England, art was much less likely to be mentioned in polite society than sexual perversions or methods of torture.

Nobody can find me here, he thought. And then he thought, what if nobody can find me here?

They had drifted apart, as people do when they promise to stay in touch; the ones who are going to stay in touch don’t need to promise.

She liked the feeling that Maine was basically inhospitable, that it would soon shake out its summer visitors, like a dog on a beach.

This was it, the big moment: the corpse of his chief enemy, the ruins of his creator, the body of his dead father; the great weight of all that was unsaid and would never have been said; the pressure to say it now, when there was nobody to hear, and to speak also on his father’s behalf, in an act of self-division that might fissure the world and turn his body into a jigsaw puzzle. This was it.

This time he was going to fall apart silently.

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.

I think that some laughter comes from escaped horror, doesn’t it?

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