“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
“Was he, after all, really a bad man doing a brilliant impersonation of an idiot? It was hard to tell. The connections between stupidity and malice were so tangled and so dense.”
— Edward St. Aubyn
“His conscience, like a sunburnt scorpion, was stinging itself to death.”
— Edward St. Aubyn
“An image flashed across her mind of two rams flinging their heads against each other on a rocky mountainside. What did the girl rams do? Faint with pleasure? Clap their cloven hooves? Lean against some nearby boulders, with little tubs of mountain grass, discussing the battle?”
— Edward St. Aubyn
“If anything should take place behind closed doors, it was cruelty and betrayal.”
— Edward St. Aubyn
“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
“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
“People never remember happiness with the care that they lavish on preserving every detail of their suffering.”
— Edward St. Aubyn
“Everything was usual. That was depression: being stuck, clinging to an out-of-date version of oneself.”
— Edward St. Aubyn
“The measure of a work of art is how much art it has in it, not how much ‘relevance’. Relevant to whom? Relevant to what? Nothing is more ephemeral than a hot topic.”
— Edward St. Aubyn
“There seemed to be no one in a position of power, from the Vatican to Wall Street, from Parliament to Scotland Yard to Fleet Street, who could think of anything better to do than abuse it….”
— Edward St. Aubyn
“No pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too big if it’s cherished.”
— Edward St. Aubyn