The Patrick Melrose Novels Quotes

“He found her pretty in a bewildered, washed-out way, but it was her restlessness that aroused him, the quiet exasperation of a woman who longs to throw herself into something significant, but cannot find what it is.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels

“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?”
― Edward St. Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels

“This time he was going to fall apart silently.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels

“You can only give things up once they start to let you down.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels

“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, The Patrick Melrose Novels

“Just as a novelist may sometimes wonder why he invents characters who do not exist and makes them do things which do not matter, so a philosopher may wonder why he invents cases that cannot occur in order to determine what must be the case.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels

“Sometimes, when he was lying in bed, a single word like ‘fear’ or ‘infinity’ flicked the roof off the house and sucked him into the night, past the stars that had been bent into bears and ploughs, and into a pure darkness where everything was annihilated except the feeling of annihilation. As the little capsule of his intelligence disintegrated, he went on feeling its burning edges, its fragmenting hull, and when the capsule flew apart he was the bits flying apart, and when the bits turned into atoms he was the flying apart itself, growing stronger instead of fading, like an evil energy defying the running out of everything and feeding on waste, and soon enough the whole of space was a waste-fuelled rush and there was no place in it for a human mind; but there he was, still feeling.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, The Complete Patrick Melrose Novels

“It was never quite clear to Eleanor why the English thought it was so distinguished to have done nothing for a long time in the same place,”
― Edward St. Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels

“Could one have a time-release epiphany, an epiphany without realizing it had happened? Or were they always trumpeted by angels and preceded by temporary blindness, Patrick wondered, as he walked down the corridor in the wrong direction.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels

“Cruelty is the opposite of love,’ said Patrick, ‘not just some inarticulate version of it.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels

“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, The Patrick Melrose Novels

“The shock of standing again under the wide pale sky, completely exposed. This must be what the oyster feels when the lemon juice falls.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels

“experience of love is that you get excited thinking that someone can mend your broken heart, and then you get angry when you realize that they can’t. A certain economy creeps into the process and the jewelled daggers that used to pierce one’s heart are replaced by ever-blunter penknives.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels

“At the same time, his past lay before him like a corpse waiting to be embalmed.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels

“I find everything boring, therefore I'm fascinating.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, The Complete Patrick Melrose Novels

“the real failure: that he couldn’t be the sort of father he wanted to be, a man who had transcended his ancestral muddle and offered his children unhaunted love. He had made it out of what he thought of as Zone One, where a parent was doomed to make his child experience what he had hated most about his life, but he was still stuck in Zone Two, where the painstaking avoidance of Zone One blinded him to fresh mistakes. In Zone Two giving was based on what the giver lacked. Nothing was more exhausting than this deficiency-driven, overcompensating zeal. He dreamt of Zone Three. He sensed that it was there, just over the hill, like the rumour of a fertile valley.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels

“No, no, I just meant…’ Patrick felt he was coming from too many directions at once.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels

“She had brushed her teeth before vomiting as well, never able to utterly crush the optimistic streak in her nature.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels

“If we can’t control our conscious responses, what chance do we have against the influences we haven’t recognized?”
― Edward St. Aubyn, The Complete Patrick Melrose Novels

“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, The Patrick Melrose Novels

“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, The Patrick Melrose Novels

“She tried to walk more slowly up the hill. God, her mind was racing, racing in neutral,”
― Edward St. Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels

“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, The Patrick Melrose Novels

“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, The Patrick Melrose Novels

“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, The Complete Patrick Melrose Novels

“David walked up the right side of the double staircase that led from the garden to the terrace. Although he was now sixty, his hair was still thick and a little wild. His face was astonishingly handsome. Its faultlessness was its only flaw; it was the blueprint of a face and had an uninhabited feeling to it, as if no trace of how its owner had lived could modify the perfection of the lines. People who knew David well watched for signs of decay, but his mask grew more noble each year. Behind his dark glasses, however rigidly he held his neck, his eyes flickered unobserved, assessing the weaknesses in people.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, The Complete Patrick Melrose Novels

“No pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too small if it's cherished”
― Edward St. Aubyn, The Complete Patrick Melrose Novels

“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, The Complete Patrick Melrose Novels

“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, The Complete Patrick Melrose Novels