Edward St. Aubyn

“Try as one might to live on the edge, thought Patrick, getting into the other lift, there was no point in competing with people who believed what they saw on television.”

“Mind you, I don’t know why people get so fixated on happiness, which always eludes them, when there are so many other invigorating experiences available, like rage, jealousy, disgust, and so forth.” - Some Hope”

“Surely: the adverb of a man without an argument.”

“With her curling blond hair and her slender limbs and her beautiful clothes, Inez was alluring in an obvious way, and yet it was easy enough to see that her slightly protruding blue eyes were blank screens of self-love on which a small selection of fake emotions was allowed to flicker.”

“In my rather brief medical practice,' said David modestly, 'I found that people spend their whole lives imagining they are about to die. Their only consolation is that one day they're right.”

“..."the waiting-room atmosphere in which death was the delayed train...”

“He was just one of those Englishmen who was always saying silly things to sound less pompous, and pompous things to sound less silly.”

“As Anne watched her, she could not help thinking of the age-old question every woman asks herself at some time or other: do I have to swallow it?”

“People never remember happiness with the care that they lavish on preserving every detail of their suffering.”

“It seems people spend the majority of their lives believing they're dying, with the only consolation being that at one point they get to be right. ”