“Before they became masters of the universe, usurers were consigned to the seventh circle of Hell. Under a rain of fire, their perpetually restless hands were a punishment for hands that had made nothing useful or good in their lifetime, just exploited the labor of others.” – Edward St. Aubyn, At Last
“Forget heroin. 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.” – Edward St. Aubyn, At Last
“Suicide wore the mask of self-rejection; but in reality nobody took their personality more seriously than the person who was planning to kill himself on its instructions. Nobody was more determined to stay in charge at any cost, to force the most mysterious aspect of life into their own imperious schedule.” – Edward St. Aubyn, At Last
“What is there to do with money except spend it when you’ve got it or be bitter about it when you haven’t? It’s a very limited commodity in which people invest the most extraordinary emotions.” – Edward St. Aubyn, At Last
“All sex was prostitution for both participants, not always in the commercial sense, but in the deeper etymological sense that they stood in for something else. The fact that this was sometimes done so effectively that there were weeks or months in which the object of desire and the person one happened to be in bed with seemed identical could not prevent the underlying model of desire from beginning to drift away, sooner or later, from its illusory home.” — Edward St. Aubyn, Mother’s Milk
“There should be a superhero called Whateverman. Not an action hero like Superman or Spiderman, but an inaction hero, a hero of resignation.” — Edward St. Aubyn, Mother’s Milk
“Would America be just like he’d imagined it? Along with the rest of the world, Robert had lived under a rain of American images most of his life. Perhaps the place had already been imagined for him and he wouldn’t be able to see anything at all.
“The first impression that came his way, while the plane was still on the ground at Heathrow, was a sense of hysterical softness. The flow of passengers up the aisle was blocked by a red-haired woman sagging at the knees under her own weight.
“‘I cannot go there. I cannot get in there,’ she panted. ‘Linda wants me to sit by the window, but I cannot fit in there.’
“‘Get in there, Linda,’ said the enormous father of the family.
“‘Dad!’ said Linda, whose size spoke for itself.
“That certainly seemed typical of something he had seen before in London’s tourist spots: a special kind of tender American obesity; not the hard-won fat of a gourmet, or the juggernaut body of a truck driver, but the apprehensive fat of people who had decided to become their own airbag systems in a dangerous world. What if their bus was hijacked by a psychopath who hadn’t brought any peanuts? Better have some now. If there was going to be a terrorist incident, why go hungry on top of everything else?
“Eventually, the Airbags dented themselves into their seats. Robert had never seen such vague faces, mere sketches on the immensity of their bodies. Even the father’s relatively protuberant features looked like the remnants of a melted candle. As she squeezed into her aisle seat, Mrs. Airbag turned to the long queue of obstructed passengers, a brown smudge of tiredness radiating from her faded hazel eyes.
“‘Thank you for your patience,’ she groaned.
“‘It’s sweet of her to thank us for something we haven’t given her,’ said Robert’s father. ‘Perhaps I should thank her for her agility.’
“Robert’s mother gave him a warning look. It turned out they were in the row behind the Airbags.
“‘You’re going to have to put the armrests down for takeoff,’ Linda’s father warned her.
“‘Mom and me are sharing these seats,’ giggled Linda. ‘Our tushes are expanding!’
“Robert peeped through the gap in the seats. He didn’t see how they were going to get the armrests down.
“After meeting the Airbags, Robert’s sense of softness spread everywhere. Even the hardness of some of the faces he saw on that warm and waxy arrival afternoon, in the flag-strewn mineral crevasses of mid-town Manhattan, looked to him like the embittered softness of betrayed children who had been told to expect everything. For those who were prepared to be consoled there was always something to eat; a pretzel stall, an ice-cream cart, a food-delivery service, a bowl of nuts on the counter, a snack machine down the corridor. He felt the pressure to drift into the mentality of grazing cattle, not just ordinary cattle but industrialized cattle, neither made to wait nor allowed to.” — Edward St. Aubyn, Mother’s Milk
“It’s important not to treat children too well–they won’t be able to compete in the real world. If you want your children to become television producers, for instance, or chief executives, it’s no use filling their little heads with ideas of trust and truth-telling and reliability. They’ll just end up being somebody’s secretary.” — Edward St. Aubyn, Mother’s Milk
“Looking after children can be a subtle way of giving up. They become the whole ones, the well ones, the postponement of happiness, the ones who won’t drink too much, give up, get divorced, become mentally ill. The part of oneself that’s fighting against decay and depression is transferred to guarding them from decay and depression. In the meantime one decays and gets depressed.” — Edward St. Aubyn, Mother’s Milk
“Most people wait for their parents to die with a mixture of tremendous sadness and plans for a new swimming pool.” — Edward St. Aubyn, Mother’s Milk
“In general babies live in a democracy of strangeness. Things happen for the first time all the time–what’s surprising is things happening again.” — Edward St. Aubyn, Mother’s Milk
“Once you got words you thought the world was everything that could be described, but it was also what couldn’t be described. In a way things were more prefect when you couldn’t describe anything.” — Edward St. Aubyn, Mother’s Milk
“Neither revenge nor forgiveness change what happened. They’re sideshows, of which forgiveness is the less attractive because it represents a collaboration with one’s persecutors.” – Edward St. Aubyn, Some Hope
“One seldom knows whether perseverance is noble or stupid until it’s too late.” – Edward St. Aubyn, Some Hope
“My experience of love is that you get excited thinking that someone can mend your broken heart, and then you get angry when you realize they can’t.” – Edward St. Aubyn, Some Hope
“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.” – Edward St. Aubyn, Some Hope
“Perhaps identity was not a building for which one had to find foundations, but rather a series of impersonations held together by a central intelligence, an intelligence that knew the history of the impersonations and eliminated the distinction between action and acting.” – Edward St. Aubyn, Some Hope
“Suffering takes place while somebody else is eating.” – Edward St. Aubyn, Bad News
“Wittgenstein had said that the philosopher’s treatment of a question was like the treatment of a disease. But which treatment? Purging? Leeches? Antibiotics against the infection of language?” – Edward St. Aubyn, Never Mind
“No pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too small if it is cherished.” – Edward St. Aubyn, Never Mind
“What charm is: being malicious about everybody except the person you are with, who then glows with the privilege of exemption.” – Edward St. Aubyn, Never Mind
“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, Never Mind
“I have written books which I have had to write, but I have not yet written a book which others have to read.” – Edward St. Aubyn, Never Mind
“I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be the master of man. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control.” – Henry Adams (quoted in Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative)
“There was once a time when there were but two persons in the world, Old Man and Old Woman. One time, when they were traveling about, Old Man met Old Woman, who said, ‘Now, let us come to an agreement of some kind; let us decide how the people shall live.’ ‘Well,’ said Old Man, ‘I am to have the first say in everything.’ To this Old Woman agreed, provided she had the second say. Then Old Man began, ‘The women are to tan the hides. When they do this, they are to rub brains on them to make them soft; they are to scrape them well with scraping tools, etc. But all this they are to do very quickly, for it will not be very hard work.’ ‘No, I will not agree to this,’ said Old Woman. ‘They must tan the hide in the way you say; but it must be made very hard work, and take a long time, so that the good workers may be found out.’ ‘Well,’ said Old Man, ‘let the people have eyes and mouths in their faces; but they shall be straight up and down.’ ‘No,’ said Old Woman, ‘we will not have them that way. We will have the eyes and mouth in the faces, as you say; but they shall all be set crosswise.’ ‘Well,’ said Old Man, ‘the people shall have ten fingers on each hand.’ ‘Oh, no!’ said Old Woman. ‘That will be too many. They will be in the way. There shall be four fingers and one thumb on each hand.’ ‘Well,’ said Old Man, ‘we shall beget children. The genitals shall be at our navels.’ ‘No,’ said Old Woman, ‘that will make childbearing too easy; the people will not care for their children. The genitals shall be at the pubes.’ So they went on until they had provided for everything in the lives of the people that were to be. Then Old Woman asked what they should do about life and death. Should the people always live, or should they die? They had some difficulty in agreeing on this; but finally Old Man said, ‘I will tell you what I will do. I will throw a buffalo chip into the water, and, if it floats, the people die for four days and live again. But, if it sinks, they will die forever.’ So he threw it in, and it floated. ‘No,’ said Old Woman, ‘we will not decide in that way. I will throw in this rock. If it floats, the people will die for four days. If it sinks, the people will die forever.’ Then Old Woman threw the rock out into the water, and it sank to the bottom. ‘There,’ said she, ‘it is better for the people to die forever; for, if they did not die forever, they would never feel sorry for each other, and there would be no sympathy in the world.’ ‘Well,’ said Old Man, ‘let it be that way.’ After a time Old Woman had a daughter, who died. She was very sorry now that it had been fixed so that people died forever. So she said to Old Man, ‘Let us have our say over again.’ ‘No,’ said he, ‘we fixed it once.’” – Clark Wissler and D. C. Duvall, Mythology of the Blackfoot Indians
“A drunken soldier with a musket in one hand and a match in the other is not a pleasant visitor to have about the house on a dark, windy night.” – Major General Henry W. Slocum, 1865 (quoted in Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative)
“When Nietzsche lost his faith, he concluded that God is dead. This is not critical thinking. This is narcissism.” — Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish
“If you can write about the wreckage the wreckage is not complete. You are intact.” — Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish
“If tradition is the great punctuator that saves us from ourselves it also usefully cuts us down to size, reminding us that we’re not that special, that our supposed uniqueness is trivial in the grand scheme of things.” — Adam Phillips, “Commanded to Mourn”
“Imposing a pattern or form on experience over long stretches of time tends to make people very impatient because the material is always so recalcitrant. Continuity is always at war with circumstance, and the contingency of events. If a religion wants to be more than a refuge it has to develop, but if it adapts too eagerly it runs the risk of dissolving.” — Adam Phillips, “Commanded to Mourn”