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)

Date: 2000

"As he allowed the old order to be dismembered, a new erotic order arose in which there was an unceasing intercourse between sensation and conception, the mental blossoming of every sensation and the embodiment of every idea."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"His patient was losing the memory of language without losing the sense of who he was. It suggests that the witness is more fundamental than the executive. When the one who acts collapses, there's still one to feel him collapse."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"Oh, for God's sake, let's stop being so cerebral; let's daub our bodies in mud and stomp around on the ground, inviting Gaia to join in our revels; let's knock back a pint of ayahuasca with some authentic tribal persons, hurtle down the tunnel of psychedelic consciousness to the dawn of time, an...

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)