Top 90 Edward St Aubyn Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Irony is the hardest addiction of all. Forget heroin. Just try giving up irony, the deep-down need to mean two things at once, to be in two places at once, not to be there for the catastrophe of a fixed meaning.”

— Edward St Aubyn

2. “People never remeber happiness with the care that they lavish on preserving every detail of their suffering.”

— Edward St Aubyn

3. “No pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too big if it’s cherished.”

— Edward St Aubyn

4. “Observe Everything. Always think for yourself. Never let other people make important decisions for you.”

— Edward St Aubyn

5. “The whole ‘Melrose’ series is an attempt to tell the truth, and is based on the idea that there is some salutary or liberating power in telling the truth.”

— Edward St Aubyn

6. “You can only give things up once they start to let you down.”

— Edward St Aubyn

7. “Detachment is what interests me, seeing how people couldn’t have been any other way, how they were the product of forces that they had no control over.”

— Edward St Aubyn

8. “I’m not trying to uncover the facts of my life but to discover the dramatic truth of the situations I was in.”

— Edward St Aubyn

9. “He had become so caught up in building sentences that he had almost forgotten the barbaric days when thinking was like a splash of color landing on a page.”

— Edward St Aubyn

10. “Everything was usual. That was depression: being stuck, clinging to an out-of-date version of oneself.”

— Edward St Aubyn

11. “Proust is a hero of mine. I read ‘A la recherche’ in one go, and I’m a very slow reader. It had an astonishing impact, reading it on my own and being my main company. I think Proust is the most intelligent person to ever have written a novel.”

— Edward St Aubyn

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12. “It was as if every time she played the ace of spades, it was beaten by a small trump.”

— Edward St Aubyn

13. “The first book I fell in love with was ‘Little Toot,’ the story of an adorable tugboat operating out of New York Harbor.”

— Edward St Aubyn

14. “This time he was going to fall apart silently.”

— Edward St Aubyn

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

— Edward St Aubyn

16. “Looking after children can be a subtle way of giving up... They become the whole ones, the well ones, the postponement of happiness, the ones who won’t drink too much, give up, get divorced, become mentally ill. The part of oneself that’s fighting against decay and depression is transferred to guarding them from decay and depression. In the meantime one decays and gets depressed.”

— Edward St Aubyn

17. “All she remembered was that Caligula had planned to torture his wife to find out why he was so devoted to her. What was David’s excuse, she wondered.”

— Edward St Aubyn

18. “I see the author as the person who has written; the writer, the one involved in the process of writing. And they’re not necessarily friends. The writer is the one I want to reinforce; the author would just feed on the reviews – so I’m in favour of starving him.”

— Edward St Aubyn

19. “I find everything boring, therefore I’m fascinating.”

— Edward St Aubyn

20. “Ninety per cent of the drugs were for him and ten per cent for Natasha, a woman who remained an impenetrable mystery to him during the six months they lived together. The only thing he felt certain about was that she irritated him; but then, who didn’t?”

— Edward St Aubyn

21. “Surely: the adverb of a man without an argument.”

— Edward St Aubyn

22. “He knew that she could not help him unravel the knot of inarticulacy that he carried inside him. Instead, he could feel it tightening, like a promise of suffocation that shadowed every breath he took.”

— Edward St Aubyn

23. “If we can’t control our conscious responses, what chance do we have against the influences we haven’t recognized?”

— Edward St Aubyn

24. “Well, the attractive thing about the subject of happiness is that it is notoriously difficult to write.”

— Edward St Aubyn

25. “He had only just made the Elysian deadline; hanging onto the typescript until the last moment in case there was something still to be done; two sentences turned into one, one sentence broken into two, the substitution of a slightly resistant adjective to engender a moment’s reflection, in short, the joys of editing, all carried out without forgetting the art that disguises art.”

— Edward St Aubyn

26. “The leafless trees, with their black branches stretched hysterically in every direction, looked to him like illustrations of a central nervous system racked by disease: studies of human suffering anatomized against the winter sky.”

— Edward St Aubyn

27. “What was the thread that held together the scattered beads of experience if not the pressure of interpretation? The meaning of life was whatever meaning one could thrust down its reluctant throat.”

— Edward St Aubyn

28. “Most people wait for their parents to die with a mixture of tremendous sadness and plans for a new swimming pool.”

— Edward St Aubyn

29. “The Park’s nice,′ his father conceded, ’but the rest of the country is just people in huge cars wondering what to eat next.”

— Edward St Aubyn

30. “He couldn’t help wondering whether love could really consist of an unpleasant combination of obsession, self-pity, rivalry, lust and day-dreaming. These characteristics didn’t seem to distinguish it from the rest of life, except by their intensity.”

— Edward St Aubyn

31. “If they made a film of my inner life, it would be more than the public could take. Mothers would scream, “Bring back The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so we can have some decent family entertainment!”

— Edward St Aubyn

32. “Other people knew what they were meant to say, knew what they were meant to mean, and other people still – otherer people – knew what the other people meant when they said it.”

— Edward St Aubyn

33. “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.”

— Edward St Aubyn

34. “What if memories were just memories, without any consolatory or persecutory power? Would they exist at all, or was it always emotional pressure that summoned images from what was potentially all of experience so far?”

— Edward St Aubyn

35. “Old enough to remember the arrival of ‘Have a nice day’, Patrick could only look with alarm on the hyperinflation of ‘Have a great one’. Where would this Weimar of bullying cheerfulness end? ‘You have a profound and meaningful day now.”

— Edward St Aubyn

36. “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.”

— Edward St Aubyn

37. “The thing about the ‘Melrose’ novels is that I have to feel they’re impossible when I set out.”

— Edward St Aubyn

38. “I feel on the verge of a great transformation, which may be as simple as becoming interested in other things.”

— Edward St Aubyn

39. “Nothing so stubborn could change until it became more painful to avoid than to confront.”

— Edward St Aubyn

40. “The Talking Heads pulsed from every speaker. ‘The centre is missing,’ gasped David Byrne, and Patrick could not help agreeing with him. How did they know exactly what he was feeling? It was spooky.”

— Edward St Aubyn

41. “Talking of ‘letting go of a lot of stuff,‘” his father handed the phrase back to Seamus, held by the corner like someone else’s used handkerchief...”

— Edward St Aubyn

42. “Balance was so elusive: either it was like this, too fast, or there was the heavy thing like wading through a swamp to get to the end of a sentence.”

— Edward St Aubyn

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

— Edward St Aubyn

44. “David dropped the hose on the gravel path, thinking how useless to him Eleanor had become. She had been rigid with terror for too long. It was like trying to palpate a patient’s swollen liver when one had already proved that it hurt. She could only be persuaded to relax so often.”

— Edward St Aubyn

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

— Edward St Aubyn

46. “I was thinking that a life is just the history of what we give our attention to,’ said Patrick. ‘The rest is packaging.”

— Edward St Aubyn

47. “It seems people spend the majority of their lives believing they’re dying, with the only consolation being that at one point they get to be right.”

— Edward St Aubyn

48. “Above all, she was a baby, not a ‘big baby’ like so many adults, but a small baby perfectly preserved in the pickling jar of money, alcohol and fantasy.”

— Edward St Aubyn

49. “At the same time, his past lay before him like a corpse waiting to be embalmed.”

— Edward St Aubyn

50. “Was this the triumph of self-knowledge: to suffer more lucidly?”

— Edward St Aubyn