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3548719
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Everything was usual. That was depression: being stuck, clinging to an out-of-date version of oneself.
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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ca4e8c0
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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.
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restlessness
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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be32a69
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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.
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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f0a325f
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Surely: the adverb of a man without an argument.
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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db06047
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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"
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life-lessons
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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60d3506
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At the beginning, there had been talk of using some of her money to start a home for alcoholics. In a sense they had succeeded.
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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0ee5100
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No, he mustn't think about it, or indeed about anything, and especially not about heroin, because heroin was the one thing that really worked, the only thing that stopped him scampering around in a hamster's wheel of unanswerable questions. Heroin was the cavalry. Heroin was the missing chair leg, made with such precision that it matched every splinter of the break. Heroin landed purring at the base of his skull, and wrapped itself darkly a..
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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dae2483
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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.
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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b3a736f
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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?
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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f66abd2
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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.
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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747bf3d
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You can only give things up once they start to let you down.
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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5568be5
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How could he think his way out of the problem when the problem was the way he thought...
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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61ac700
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We are entering the Dark Ages, my friend, but this time there will be lots of neon, and screen savers, and street lighting.
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neon
screen-savers
street-lighting
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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f2a4507
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Nothing so stubborn could change until it became more painful to avoid than to confront.
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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0145bbd
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The measure of a work of art is how much art it has in it, not how much 'relevance'. Relevant to whom? Relevant to what? Nothing is more ephemeral than a hot topic.
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literature
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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9ce6604
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She was ghastly and quite mad, but when I grew up I figured her worst punishment was to be herself and I didn't have to do anything more.
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Edward St Aubyn |
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2639f70
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The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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135e392
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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.
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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dd7499a
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Rome wasn't deconstructed in a day.
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rome
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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3145af8
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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.
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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ec36463
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This time he was going to fall apart silently.
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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cb14abf
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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,
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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4e8a1e7
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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.
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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0a42d12
|
If you were madly in love, you'd want me to win,' said Katherine. "'I'm not sure that's true,' said Sam. 'I think love is about equality: both of us equally happy with either result. One-sided self-sacrifice is only enabling someone else's egoism. Altruists always end up riddled with resentment, or if they make that last superhuman effort, with spiritual pride.' "'Oh,' said Katherine, 'you mean you're not going to enable my egoism.' "'Okay,..
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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d767ed0
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After less than a year together they now slept in separate rooms because Victor's snoring, and nothing else about him, kept her awake at night.
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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560dc4b
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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 w..
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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16325de
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I was thinking that a life is just the history of what we give our attention to,' said Patrick. 'The rest is packaging.
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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0898ddc
|
Personally I think that competition should be encouraged in war and sport and business, but that it makes no sense in the arts. If an artist is good, nobody else can do what he or she does and therefore all comparisons are incoherent.
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competition
comparison
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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f3a56c2
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The shock of standing again under the wide pale sky, completely exposed. This must be what the oyster feels when the lemon juice falls.
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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178b16a
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But that, after all, was the point of romantic folly. If it hadn't all gone horribly wrong, it wouldn't have been the real thing.
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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fb4e971
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Above all, she was a baby, not a 'big baby' like so many adults, but a small baby perfectly preserved in the pickling jar of money, alcohol and fantasy.
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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63788a9
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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.
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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3659743
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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.
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humor
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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e8ad552
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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.
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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c6e8113
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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.
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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85257f9
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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.
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stupidity
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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1484fa8
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People think they are individuals because they use the word ''I'' so often.
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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4344402
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Every paradise demands a serpent.
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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539db70
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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.
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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94c5697
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Was this the triumph of self-knowledge: to suffer more lucidly?
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self-knowledge
suffering
lucidity
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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f711d53
|
Thanks for putting that in terms I can easily grasp,' said Malcolm, without showing the patronizing bitch the slightest sign of irony.
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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34134a4
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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.
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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8315720
|
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;
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Edward St. Aubyn |
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01890a5
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An editor sleeping with his writer was not as bad as a psychoanalyst sleeping with his patient, or even a professor sleeping with an undergraduate, let alone a president with an intern.
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writer
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Edward St. Aubyn |