Date: 2000

"It's the medium-sized thoughts that jump ship in an emergency."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"The feeling raged through him, like a burning rope he couldn't hold on to, although someone he loved was falling at the other end of it; it ripped the skin from his hands."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"'I must have done,' I said, feeling the memory of another dozen books slide down Lethe's greasy banks."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"The grief a loving son would feel, and of which I had no inkling when my own mother was lowered into her flinty grave, tornadoed through me at the news of the countess's death."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"I dread the prospect of the pressure of death roaming through my psyche like a wildcat prospector and producing these eruptions of unwelcome insight."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"I rolled my forehead against hers, trying to break through the fortress of our lonely skulls and meld our yearning minds."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"And some doctors, mapping out brain function in a style no less convincing than medieval cartography."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"Jolting out of his rank and troubled sleep he would transcribe his dream images before they slipped beneath the horizon of consciousness."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"At first he tried to contain this chaos: surely there were choices behind these analogies, desires behind the choices, psychological structures behind the desires, and, underlying the psychology, the stainless steel of generative grammar."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"This analysis made him feel false, made him feel he was resisting an insight rather than having one. It was untrue to the quality of his experience, to the plasticity of his choices, the molten emergence and reabsorption of images."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)