28 Quotes by Patrick McGrath

How has it come to this? Where once my life was populated with the living, now I seem to keep company only with ghosts and ghouls and the like.

Various pieces of huge dark furniture constricted the passage, and the place smelled of boiled fish. I was shown into the parlor, where the gloom of that overcast day was filtered through windows curtained in dingy lace.

For oh dear, it is a spartan business, this growing old, this cleaving to life, because it demands that you jettison so much that once had been the very zest and pith of life, and why? So that life, pithless, and sans zest, may continue, and the flesh, oh, the flesh, the sins of the flesh - they are as motes in a fading sunbeam. And how I do miss them.

Dear God but I despair of these women who abandon their filters in age and just say whatever comes into their heads.

We coexisted in a state of mutual detachment.

As we shook hands I wondered idly what her urine looked like.

So let there be no more of this clucking and wheedling. Oh, Pa, are you sure? Or: Oh, Francis, is this really a good idea? Let me be clear. I am always sure, and it is always a good idea.

This is the nature of people, they unerringly select as their victim the one who most needs their warmth.

Nothing improper was occurring, on the surface, but she hadn’t said a word about her new friend to Max; and by consistently failing to mention and event of significance in her day she was practising a form of duplicity.