28 Quotes by Patrick McGrath

Solitude is a terrible thing, for it permits the imagination to picture, in detail, that which perhaps should never be articulated.

There is something I have learned since being paralyzed, and that is that in the absence of sensory information, the imagination always tends to the grotesque.

I often wondered how it would be to tramp off into the mountains and keep going until I was exhausted, then simply sink into the snow and fall asleep. Then the wolves could have me.To want to die in the forest and be eaten by wolves: another marker of incipient madness.

The reason I survived when others died is my business. War is rarely tidy, never clean. We all know that.

Soon enough the tears came but of course nobody came down to see if she was all right, it was just the slut in the kitchen who'd ruined their lives, getting drunk of neat gin and howling for her lost lunatic offer.

these are precisely the conditions that killed love, after first blighting its growth: squalor, fear, uncertainty, overfamiliarity.

Strange how reluctant I was to acknowledge that control of my fate lay beyond my own conscious will. Habit of a lifetime, I suppose.

Hugo," she said, in a certain hurt tone that I knew well and enjoyed provoking, "you can be most horribly rude when you choose. Why do you choose?

Houses, I have come to believe, like love, like nature herself, should not reassure, should not attempt to soothe, or give comfort, but should, rather, excite.