The Complete Patrick Melrose Novels

by Edward St. Aubyn

‘But that’s what charm is: being malicious about everybody except the person you are with, who then glows with the privilege of exemption.’

HOW COULD HE THINK his way out of the problem when the problem was the way he thought,

Above all, he wanted to stop being a child without using the cheap disguise of becoming a parent.

What could he do but accept the disturbing extent to which memory was fictional and hope that the fiction lay at the service of a truth less richly represented by the original facts?

another human being who had not handled his personality especially well;

How best to manage ones own personality?

only when he could live with the ambivalence of never forgiving his father for his crimes but allowing himself to be touched by the unhappiness that had produced them as well as the unhappiness they had produced, could he be released, perhaps, into a new life that would enable him to live instead of merely surviving.

Forgiving yourself

Sometimes he was a snuffling little animal and then, seconds later, he was radiating an ancient calm, at ease with everything.

Practically anything was less complicated than being a successful alcoholic.

Just try giving up irony, that 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.’

Ha

Patrick wanted to stop the car and get out and walk; he wanted a shot of whisky, a shot of heroin, a revolver shot in the head—kill the screaming man, get it over with, be in charge. He let these impulses wash over him without paying them too much attention.