Mother's Milk Quotes

“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, Mother's Milk

“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, Mother's Milk

“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, Mother's Milk

“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, Mother's Milk

“The past has all the time in the world. It's only the future which is running out.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, Mother's Milk

“So much road and so few places, so much friendliness and so little intimacy, so much flavour and so little taste.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, Mother's Milk

“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, Mother's Milk

“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, Mother's Milk

“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, Mother's Milk

“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, Mother's Milk

“Eleanor believed more or less anything, as long as it was untrue.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, Mother's Milk

“The Oedipal vortex had him caught like a dead leaf in its compulsory spin, wanting one consolation after another. Some languages kept the ideas of desire and privation apart, but English forced them into the naked intimacy of a single syllable: want. Wanting love to ease the want of love. The war on want which made one want more. Whiskey was no better at looking after him than his mother had been, or his wife had become, or the pink cardigan would be if he lurched across the room, fell to his knees and begged her for mercy. Why did he want to do that?”
― Edward St. Aubyn, Mother's Milk

“Some languages kept the ideas of desire and privation apart, but English forced them into the naked intimacy of a single syllable: want.”
― Edward St Aubyn, MOTHERS MILK