Top 90 Edward St Aubyn Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I’m really not responsible for what mental operation people have when they’re reading my books other than the ones which are created by literary effects.”

— Edward St Aubyn

52. “Words are our slaves: they may be used to fetch a pair of slippers, or to build the great pyramid of Giza: they depend on syntax to make the order of the world manifest, to raise stones into arches and arches into aqueducts.”

— Edward St Aubyn

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

— Edward St Aubyn

54. “In the Dodge City of romantic love, crowded with betrayal, abandonment and rejection, it was better to fire first than to take the risk of being gunned down.”

— Edward St Aubyn

55. “Anne came downstairs wearing a white cotton dress almost indistinguishable from the white cotton nightgown she had taken off.”

— Edward St Aubyn

56. “Nobody ever died of a feeling, he would say to himself, not believing a word of it, as he sweated his way through the feeling that he was dying of fear. People died of feelings all the time, once they had gone through the formality of materializing them into bullets and bottles and tumours.”

— Edward St Aubyn

57. “It’s no use imagining that bringing great writers together inevitably precipitates great conversation.”

— Edward St Aubyn

58. “A little Indian guy being sneered at by monsters of English privilege would normally have unleashed the full weight of Anne’s loyalty to underdogs, but this time it was wiped out by Vijay’s enormous desire to be a monster of English privilege himself.”

— Edward St Aubyn

59. “She was ghastly and quite mad, but when I grew up I figured her worst punishment was to be herself and I didn’t have to do anything more.”

— Edward St Aubyn

60. “His conscience, like a sunburnt scorpion, was stinging itself to death.”

— Edward St Aubyn

61. “An editor sleeping with his writer was not as bad as a psychoanalyst sleeping with his patient, or even a professor sleeping with an undergraduate, let alone a president with an intern.”

— Edward St Aubyn

62. “I’ll let you in on a little secret, Garry: everything is history. By the time you notice it, it’s already happened. That famous imposter, “the present,” disappears in the cognitive gap. Mind the gap!”

— Edward St Aubyn

63. “They had never met, but she had come to understand what had driven Victor’s wife to seek refuge in a full set of Snoopy mugs.”

— Edward St Aubyn

64. “She had brushed her teeth before vomiting as well, never able to utterly crush the optimistic streak in her nature.”

— Edward St Aubyn

65. “Most people either felt regret at staying with someone for too long, or regret at losing them too easily. I manage to feel both ways at the same time about the same object.”

— Edward St Aubyn

66. “Something had happened and he, like almost everyone else, had got used to the habit of life. Perhaps that’s all life was: a habit that resisted the adventure of death.”

— Edward St Aubyn

67. “How could he think his way out of the problem when the problem was the way he thought...”

— Edward St Aubyn

68. “Either I wake up in the Grey Zone,’ he whispered, ’and I’ve forgotten how to breathe, and my feet are so far away I’m not sure I can afford the air fare;.”

— Edward St Aubyn

69. “There’s a blast of palpable stupidity that comes from our host, like opening the door of a sauna. The best way to contradict him is to let him speak.”

— Edward St Aubyn

70. “Rome wasn’t deconstructed in a day.”

— Edward St Aubyn

71. “Classically, the patient went into psychotherapy because she was neurotic from the suppression of her perverse desires, now she goes into psychotherapy because she is guilty about not enjoying her perverse desires.”

— Edward St Aubyn

72. “Once he had taken heroin he could imagine being without it;.”

— Edward St Aubyn

73. “I think that some laughter comes from escaped horror, doesn’t it?”

— Edward St Aubyn

74. “Lying on a pile of pillows and smaller cushions, slurping her coffee and playing with her cigarette smoke, she felt briefly that her thoughts were growing more subtle and expansive.”

— Edward St Aubyn

75. “Patrick’s own nanny was dead. A friend of his mother’s said she had gone to heaven, but Patrick had been there and knew perfectly well that they had put her in a wooden box and dropped her in a hole. Heaven was the other direction and so the woman was lying, unless it was like sending a parcel.”

— Edward St Aubyn

76. “At the beginning, there had been talk of using some of her money to start a home for alcoholics. In a sense they had succeeded.”

— Edward St Aubyn

77. “People think they are individuals because they use the word ″I″ so often.”

— Edward St Aubyn

78. “The drive rose sharply to the left of the steps to a circle of flat ground where her maroon Buick was parked under an umbrella pine. It looked preposterous, stretched out on its white-walled tyres against the terraced vines and olive groves behind it, but to Eleanor her car was like a consulate in a strange city, and she moved towards it with the urgency of a robbed tourist.”

— Edward St Aubyn

79. “Every paradise demands a serpent.”

— Edward St Aubyn

80. “Unlike the riotous appetites of adolescence, his present cravings had a tragic tinge, they were cravings for the appetites, metacravings, wanting to want.”

— Edward St Aubyn

81. “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.”

— Edward St Aubyn

82. “The Booker 2011 is of no more interest to me than the world heavyweight championship, which I’m not going to win either. It’s irrelevant.”

— Edward St Aubyn

83. “Presumably those who enjoyed inflicting cruelty could hardly believe their luck and set about popularizing the superstition that their victims could only achieve peace of mind by forgiving them.’ ‘You.”

— Edward St Aubyn

84. “Were the ironies of taxation any better: raising money for schools and hospitals and roads and bridges, and spending it on blowing up schools and hospitals and roads and bridges in self-defeating wars?”

— Edward St Aubyn

85. “The way other people felt about love, he felt about heroin, and he felt about love the way other people felt about heroin: that it was a dangerous and incomprehensible waste of time.”

— Edward St Aubyn

86. “Why was he in this state? Or perhaps the question was why had he not always been in this state? Why had he not always found life so disturbing and so poignant?”

— Edward St Aubyn

87. “How could he relax his guard when beams of neurotic energy, like searchlights weaving about a prison compound, allowed no thought to escape, no remark to go unchecked.”

— Edward St Aubyn

88. “Just before the top of the hill she stopped, breathed deeply, and tried to muster her scattered sense of calm, like a bride checking her veil in the last mirror before the aisle.”

— Edward St Aubyn

89. “He knew as deeply as he knew anything that sedation was the prelude to anxiety, stimulation the prelude to exhaustion and consolation the prelude to disappointment, and so he lay on the red velvet sofa and did nothing to distract himself from the news of his mother’s death.”

— Edward St Aubyn

90. “So much road and so few places, so much friendliness and so little intimacy, so much flavour and so little taste.”

— Edward St Aubyn