Quotes by Patrick McGrath

“to sacrifice all for love would soon find (one) in a very difficult situation. Love at a certain point, has to relinquish its exclusiveness, lovers have to become rehabilitated into the wider society.”

“Shell be in front of me twice a month so I will know what she is doing and not doing,”

“There are no words strong enough to deplore the acts she committed,”

We see nobody clearly. We see only the ghosts of absent others, and mistake for reality the fictions we construct from blueprints drawn up in early childhood. This is the problem.

Our conversations were like sex, our sex like conversation.

Soon enough the tears came but of course nobody came down to see if she was all right, it was just the slut in the kitchen whod ruined their lives, getting drunk of neat gin and howling for her lost lunatic offer.

Solitude is a terrible thing, for it permits the imagination to picture, in detail, that which perhaps should never be articulated.

Isolated people, those who live alone, are always conscious of their condition in the homes of families.

I often wondered how it would be to tramp off into the mountains and keep going until I was exhausted, then simply sink into the snow and fall asleep. Then the wolves could have me.To want to die in the forest and be eaten by wolves: another marker of incipient madness.

Strange how reluctant I was to acknowledge that control of my fate lay beyond my own conscious will. Habit of a lifetime, I suppose.

A tissue of small sounds filled the room, a bird, a clock, a voice from another garden. What we call silence.

Perhaps thats the whole point about infidelity, I suggested, not that one has sex but that by doing so one puts at risk someone elses happiness?

For despite his confidence, and his apparent maturity, I suspected that there was in him a deep and childish need to elevate, and idealize, the love object. This is not uncommon in artists. The very nature of their work, the long periods of isolation followed by public self-display, and the associated risk of rejection all conspire to create unnaturally intense relationships with their sexual partners. Then, when disillusion occurs, as of course it must, the sense of betrayal is profound...