Date: 2000

"I realised how little substance any of my feelings had without the loop of listening to myself think and speak. Better to stay on this clifftop having my thoughts ripped from me by a gale."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"I fell silent, my mood shattered like the waves exploding on the coast below."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"Why was the copula between the brain and the mind plunged in an obligatory darkness?"

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"He must get the whole thing clear, like a diagram hanging in the translucent space of his imagination, the blueprint of a missile that would lay waste to the Great Consciousness Debate."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"After an unconvincing exchange of phone numbers, the three characters dispersed into the damp London night, each locked in their partially private and, even to themselves, partially hidden minds, but all standing firmly on the common ground of having no explanation for the real nature of this ti...

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"'Never give up hope,' said Arnie, a million fatuously happy endings cluttering up his mind."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"They just went rolling on in their parallel curvature, only brought together by storms, like the mind and the body forever separated by the 'explanatory gap' but brought together by the storm of life."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"The scattered jigsaw puzzle of my attention reassembled into a single image."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"Outside, no limits; inside, no room. Then no limits inside, then none inside me. Agoraphobia on the bone, agoraphobia in the marrow."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"A man in my position might easily head for the mountains and try to find consolation in their perseverance -- never mind the rock slides, the sinking plateaux and erupting islands -- or, at the opposite extreme, he might extort some pleasure from knowing that he will outlast the flies spinning o...

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)