Edward St Aubyn Quotes

What i’m saying is, my friends, one ought to be able to let go. If a path does not please us, instead of insisting on going that specific way, of making our selfishness the guide, we ought to forsake. The books we cannot write, the films we cannot shoot, the projects we cannot develop, the jobs we cannot pursue and the people who no longer love us. Being able to let go, at times, is the most beautiful of all!

Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go.

It's so much easier to have no expectations than to have big ones.

The joy of losing consists in this: Where there are no expectations, there is no disappointment.

I've learned to not have expectations. If you don't expect things from anyone, you can't get let down.

In the end you can't always choose what to keep. You can only choose how you let it go.

If I learned anything in this life, I've learned that you can't cling on.

Get used to disappointment.

Even as I hold you, I am letting you go.

If you were wise enough to know that this life would consist mostly of letting go of things you wanted, then why not get good at the letting go, rather than the trying to have?

We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.

You don't have to give up to let go

Life is an apprenticeship to the constant renunciations, to the steady failure of our claims, our hopes, our powers, our liberty.

To renounce things is not to give them up. It is to acknowledge that all things go away.

You can be as mad as a mad dog at the way things went, you can curse the fates, but when it comes to the end, you have to let go.

Whatever life takes away from you, let it go.

Surrender, but don’t give yourself away.

Never say about anything, "I have lost it," but only "I have given it back." Is your child dead? It has been given back. Is your wife dead? She has been returned.

Always retain the ability to walk away, without sentimentality, from a situation that felt unmanageable. That was a basic rule of survival. Don't lift a finger for a lost cause.

Beautiful loser, where you gonna fall? When you realize, you just can't have it all.

It was too much work to remember things you might not have again, and so one by one they opened up their hands and let them go.

The easiest way to lose something is to want it too badly.

Never say of anything I have lost it, only say that I have given it back.

Hating someone is giving them too much, just leave them alone.

How well we have learned to let go