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Patrick McGrath Quotes

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All Ghosts Infidelity Loneliness Trauma Affair Alcohol Asylum Craziness Crying Death

Famous Patrick McGrath Quotes

“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.”

Death Madness Suicide Trauma Snow Wolves

Book:Trauma

Source: Trauma

“Nobody touches you after seventy except doctors, as a rule. A sister, if you're lucky enough to have one. Undertakers.”

Doctors Old Age Touching Sister Undertakers

Book:Last Days in Cleaver Square

Source: Last Days in Cleaver Square

“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.”

Sadness Loneliness Tears Lonely Alcohol Lover Infidelity Crying Lunatic Gin Asylum Slut

Author: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...”

Jealousy

Book:Asylum

Source: Asylum

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

Loneliness Solitude

Book:The Grotesque

Source: The Grotesque

“Se non lo sai non posso spiegartelo". "allora non si può definire? Non se ne può parlare? è una cosa che nasce, che non si può ignorare, che distrugge la vita delle persone. Ma non possiamo dire nient'altro, Esiste, e basta.”

Psychology Craziness

Book:Follia

Source: Follia

“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?”

Affair Lust Infidelity

Author:Patrick McGrath

“Dear God but I despair of these women who abandon their filters in age and just say whatever comes into their heads.”

Filters Old Women

Book:Last Days in Cleaver Square

Source: Last Days in Cleaver Square

“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.”

Reality Trauma Ghosts Other People

Book:Trauma

Source: Trauma

“As we shook hands I wondered idly what her urine looked like.”

Urine

Book:Dr. Haggard's Disease

Source: Dr. Haggard's Disease

“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.”

Furniture Fish Lace Dingy

Book:The Grotesque

Source: The Grotesque

“How has it come to this? Where once my life was populated with the living, now I seem to keep company only with ghosts and ghouls and the like.”

Ghosts Ghouls

Book:Last Days in Cleaver Square

Source: Last Days in Cleaver Square

About the Author

Known for: Author
Quotes: 12

Books & Sources

Last Days in Cleaver SquareRelated source material

The GrotesqueRelated source material

TraumaRelated source material

AsylumRelated source material

Dr. Haggard's DiseaseRelated source material

FolliaRelated source material