Patrick McGrath Quotes & Sayings

There is something I have learned since being paralyzed, and that is that in the absence of sensory information, the imagination always tends to the grotesque. — Patrick McGrath

I am not, as you will have observed, a man greatly enamored of his fellow human beings. I do not enter lightly into the foibles and whimsicalities of others, I do not suffer fools gladly, I seem able, in conversation, only to needle or be needled. My relationships, as a result, are few, and those few are tenuous, prickly sorts of arrangements, altogether lacking in the spontaneity and intimacy for which humans, I'm told, have an instinctive need. I am aware of no such instincts myself. — Patrick McGrath

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

Stella realized then that Charlie's unhappiness had locked him out of this community as effectively as hers had, and she felt a dull sense of confirmation, she felt she might have known, this is the nature of people, they unerringly select as their victim the one who most needs their warmth. — Patrick McGrath

Various pieces of huge dark furniture constricted the passage, and the place smelled of boiled fish. I was shown into the parlor, where the gloom of that overcast day was filtered through windows curtained in dingy lace. — Patrick McGrath

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 ... — Patrick McGrath

These are precisely the conditions that killed love, after first blighting its growth: squalor, fear, uncertainty, overfamiliarity. — Patrick McGrath

Thus was I recruited, and thus would I be ruined: for a penny. — Patrick McGrath

As we shook hands I wondered idly what her urine looked like. — Patrick McGrath

The uncanny first impression was again one of private hells coexisting in public space. — Patrick McGrath

Houses, I have come to believe, like love, like nature herself, should not reassure, should not attempt to soothe, or give comfort, but should, rather, excite. — Patrick McGrath

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

We coexisted in a state of mutual detachment. — Patrick McGrath

Harry Peake's spine disturbed the people's confidence in the proper shape and form of things, a confidence they had not known they possessed, it was stitched so deep in their sense of the order of the world. — Patrick McGrath

He stripped his clothes off and flung himself into a heavy sea, for the sheer pleasure of getting out safe again. — Patrick McGrath

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 who'd ruined their lives, getting drunk of neat gin and howling for her lost lunatic offer. — Patrick McGrath

Hugo," she said, in a certain hurt tone that I knew well and enjoyed provoking, "you can be most horribly rude when you choose. Why do you choose? — Patrick McGrath

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. — Patrick McGrath

Our conversations were like sex, our sex like conversation. — Patrick McGrath

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

Perhaps that's the whole point about infidelity, I suggested, not that one has sex but that by doing so one puts at risk someone else's happiness? — Patrick McGrath

All was strange in a fog, buildings grew vague, human beings groped and became lost, the landmarks, the compass points, by which they navigated melted into nothingness and the world was transfigured into a country of the blind. But if the sighted became blind, then the blind - and for some odd reason I have always regarded myself as one of the blind - the blind became sighted, and I remember felling at home in the fog, happily at ease in the murk and gloom that so confused my neighbors. — Patrick McGrath

Nothing improper was occurring, on the surface, but she hadn't said a word about her new friend to Max; and by consistently failing to mention and event of significance in her day she was practising a form of duplicity. — Patrick McGrath

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. — Patrick McGrath

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