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All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day. -- Evelyn Waugh
If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be. -- Evelyn Waugh
So you never got to wherever it was. Weren't you terribly disappointed, Sebastian?
Julia Flyte -- Evelyn Waugh
At first it was impressive, but after half and hour deadly monotonous. It was like everything German - overdone. -- Evelyn Waugh
There was one thing unforgivable, like things in the schoolroom so bad that only Mommy could deal with, to set up a rival good to God's. -- Evelyn Waugh
He lit his cigar and sat back at peace with the world; I, too, was at peace in another world than his. We both were happy. He talked of Julia and I heard his voice, unintelligible at a great distance, like a dog's barking miles away on a still night. -- Evelyn Waugh
Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything. -- Evelyn Waugh
O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin, -- Evelyn Waugh
Your colleague, Captain Grimes, has been convicted before me on evidence that leaves no possibility of his innocence - of a crime (I might almost call it a course of action) which I can neither understand nor excuse. I dare say I need not particularise. -- Evelyn Waugh
If every museum in the New World were emptied, if every famous building in the Old World were destroyed and only Venice saved, there would be enough there to fill a full lifetime with delight. Venice, with all its complexity and variety, is in itself the greatest surviving work of art in the world. -- Evelyn Waugh
I don't believe that people would ever fall in love or want to be married if they hadn't been told about it. It's like abroad: no one would want to go there if they hadn't been told it existed. -- Evelyn Waugh
These memories, which are my life
for we possess nothing certainly except the past
were always with me. -- Evelyn Waugh
I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live but I am told that this is a common experience. -- Evelyn Waugh
The great charm in argument is really finding one's own opinions, not other people's. -- Evelyn Waugh
What is a "canty day", Dennis?'
'I've never troubled to ask. Something like hogmanay, I expect.'
'What is that?'
'People being sick on the pavement in Glasgow.'
'Oh. -- Evelyn Waugh
Do you want to change?"
"It's the only evidence of life. -- Evelyn Waugh
What is adolescence without trash? -- Evelyn Waugh
One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die. -- Evelyn Waugh
Oh, my darling, why is it that love makes me hate the world? It's supposed to have quite the opposite effect. I feel as though all mankind, and God, too, were in a conspiracy against us. -- Evelyn Waugh
Once you start changing a name, you see, there's no reason ever to stop. One always hears one that sounds better. -- Evelyn Waugh
It's awful to think that I shall probably never, as long as I live, see you dancing like that again all by yourself. -- Evelyn Waugh
You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being. -- Evelyn Waugh
Beavers bred in captivity, inhabiting a concrete pool, will, if given the timber, fatuously go through all the motions of damming an ancestral stream. -- Evelyn Waugh
Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you. -- Evelyn Waugh
No one will write books once they reach heaven, but there is an excellent library, containing all the books written up to date, including all the lost books and the ones that the authors burned when they came back from the last publisher. -- Evelyn Waugh
Even on that convivial evening I could feel my host emanating little magnetic waves of social uneasiness, creating, rather, a pool of general embarrassment about himself in which he floated with log-like calm. -- Evelyn Waugh
A necklace of pearls on a white neck.
We had lost the sense of discovery which had infused the anarchy of our first year. I began to settle down.
... the old house in the foreground, the rest of the world abandoned and forgotten; a world of its own of peace and love and beauty ... -- Evelyn Waugh
As my intimacy with his family grew, I became part of the world which he sought to escape; I became one of the bonds which held him. -- Evelyn Waugh
Most writers in the course of their careers become thick-skinned and learn to accept vituperation, which in any other profession would be unimaginably offensive, as a healthy counterpoise to unintelligent praise. -- Evelyn Waugh
Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them. -- Evelyn Waugh
To Father Rothschild no passage was worse than any other. He thought of the sufferings of the saints, the mutability of human nature, the Four Last Things, and between whiles repeated snatches of the penitential psalms. -- Evelyn Waugh
Beer commercials are so patriotic: Made the American Way. What does that have to do with America? Is that what America stands for? Feeling sluggish and urinating frequently? -- Evelyn Waugh
I'll pray for you."
"That's very kind of you."
"I can't spare you a whole rosary, you know. Just a decade. I've got such a long list of people. I take them in order and they get a decade about once a week. -- Evelyn Waugh
That's the public-school system all over. They may kick you out, but they never let you down. -- Evelyn Waugh
She had regained what I thought she had lost forever, the magical sadness which had drawn me to her, the thwarted look that had seemed to say, Surely I was made for some other purpose than this? -- Evelyn Waugh
Her heart was broken perhaps, but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture. In a wider and grander way she felt things had been simplified. -- Evelyn Waugh
It is typical of Oxford, I said, to start the new year in autumn. -- Evelyn Waugh
At a banquet given in his honour Sir Jocelyn Hitchcock once modestly attributed his success in life to the habit of "getting up earlier than the other fellow." But this was partly metaphorical, partly false and in case wholly relative for journalists are as a rule late risers. -- Evelyn Waugh
The worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. That is what it would mean; starting a life with you, without Him.
Julia to Charles -- Evelyn Waugh
He was entrancing, with that epicene beauty which in extreme youth sings aloud for love and withers at the first cold wind. -- Evelyn Waugh
His courtesy was somewhat extravagant. He would write and thank people who wrote to thank him for wedding presents and when he encountered anyone as punctilious as himself the correspondence ended only with death. -- Evelyn Waugh
My dear, I should like to stick you full of barbed arrows like a p-p-pin cushion ... Where do you lurk? I shall come down your burrow and ch-chivvy you out like an old st-t-toat. -- Evelyn Waugh
The fortnight at Venice passed quickly and sweetly
perhaps too sweetly; I was drowning in honey, stingless. -- Evelyn Waugh
I used to know Brian Howard well
a dazzling young man to my innocent eyes. In later life he became very dangerous
constantly attacking people with his fists in public places
so I kept clear of him. He was consumptive but the immediate cause of his death was a broken heart. -- Evelyn Waugh
No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can't really hate God either. When they want to Hate Him and His saints they have to find something like themselves and pretends it's God and hate that. -- Evelyn Waugh
I know I am awful. But how much more awful I should be without the Faith. -- Evelyn Waugh
Of the many smells of Athens two seem to me the most characteristic - that of garlic, bold and deadly like acetylene gas. and that of dust, soft and warm and caressing like tweed. -- Evelyn Waugh
Not for her the cruel, delicate luxury of choice, the indolent, cat-and-mouse pastimes of the hearth-rug. No Penelope she; she must hunt in the forest. -- Evelyn Waugh
I loved buildings that had grown silently with the centuries, catching the best of each generation while time curbed the artist's pride and the philistine's vulgarity and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman. -- Evelyn Waugh
I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed. -- Evelyn Waugh
At night his most frequent recurring dream was of doing The Times crossword puzzle; his most disagreeable that he was reading a tedious book aloud to his family. -- Evelyn Waugh
One does not travel, any more than one falls in love, to collect material. It is simply part of one's life ... -- Evelyn Waugh
I do not believe the expenditure of $2.50 for a book entitles the purchaser to the personal friendship of the author. -- Evelyn Waugh
Sebastian is in love with his own childhood. That will make him very unhappy. -- Evelyn Waugh
Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all. -- Evelyn Waugh
It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one's youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one's stature on the edge of the door. -- Evelyn Waugh
In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice. -- Evelyn Waugh
There was a regulation that if they remained at large in enemy territory for some weeks longer, they could be repatriated to the United States. It was for this that they had made a hazardous parachute jump and destroyed an expensive, very slightly damaged aeroplane. -- Evelyn Waugh
I have been in the scholastic profession long enough to know that nobody enters it unless he has some very good reason that he is anxious to conceal. -- Evelyn Waugh
I am suing Lord Beaverbrook for libel and hope for some lovely tax-free money in damages. He has very conveniently told some lies about me. -- Evelyn Waugh
Creative Endeavour lost her wings, Mrs Ape. -- Evelyn Waugh
Miss Runcible wore trousers and Miles touched up his eye-lashes in the dining-room of the hotel where they stopped for luncheon. So they were asked to leave. -- Evelyn Waugh
Of course those that have charm don't really need brains. -- Evelyn Waugh
Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom. -- Evelyn Waugh
He was fortified by a memory which kept only the good things and rejected the ill. Despite his sorrows, he had had a fair share of joys and these were ever fresh and accessible. -- Evelyn Waugh
It (modernization) is just another jungle closing in. -- Evelyn Waugh
But in the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. No one would think of making an after-dinner speech without the help of poetry. It used to be the classics, now it's lyric verse. -- Evelyn Waugh
Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son. -- Evelyn Waugh
Despite their promises at the last Election, the politicians had not yet changed the climate. -- Evelyn Waugh
Aunt Fanny tells me you made great friends with Mr. Mottram. I'm sure he can't be very nice.'
'I don't think he is,' said Julia. 'I don't know that I like nice people -- Evelyn Waugh
I had been there before; I knew all about it. -- Evelyn Waugh
We class schools into four grades: leading school, first-rate school, good school and school. -- Evelyn Waugh
We class schools, you see, into four grades: Leading School, First-rate School, Good School, and School. Frankly," said Mr Levy, "School is pretty bad ... -- Evelyn Waugh
The Welsh are the only nation in the world that has produced no graphic or plastic art, no architecture, no drama. They just sing. Sing and blow down wind instruments of plated silver. -- Evelyn Waugh
The better sort of Ishmaelites have been Christian for many centuries and will not publicly eat human flesh uncooked in Lent, without special and costly dispensation from their bishop. -- Evelyn Waugh
He had no strength for any other war than his own solitary struggle to keep alive. -- Evelyn Waugh
If she looked further than the wedding, it was to see marriage as the beginning of individual existence, this skirmish from which one one's spurs, from which one set out on the true quests of life. -- Evelyn Waugh
The anguished suspense of watching the lips you hunger for, framing the words, the death sentence, of sheer triteness! -- Evelyn Waugh
Peter Pastmaster and the absurdly youthful colonel of the new force were drawing up a list of suitable officers in Bratts Club.
'Most of war seems to consist of hanging about,' he said. 'Let's at least hang about with our own friends. -- Evelyn Waugh
To understand all is to forgive all. -- Evelyn Waugh
Limbo is the place. In Limbo one has natural happiness without the beatific vision; no harps; no communal order; but wine and conversation and imperfect, various humanity. Limbo for the unbaptized, for the pious heathen, the sincere sceptic. -- Evelyn Waugh
But I don't know a word of German, I've had no experience, I've got no testimonials, and I can't play cricket.'
'It doesn't do to be too modest,' said Mr Levy. 'It's wonderful what one can teach when one tries. -- Evelyn Waugh
The avalanche was down, the hillside swept bare behind it; the last echoes died on the white slopes; the new mount glittered and lay still in the silent valley. -- Evelyn Waugh
Yes, I was determined to have a happy Christmas' 'Did you?' 'I think so. I don't remember it much, and that's always a good sign, isn't it? -- Evelyn Waugh
You'll find you spend half your second year shaking off the undesirable friends you made in your first ... -- Evelyn Waugh
It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it is based. -- Evelyn Waugh
A whole Gothic world had come to grief ... there was now no armour glittering through the forest glades, no embroidered feet on the green sward; the cream and dappled unicorns had fled ... -- Evelyn Waugh
There is an Easter sense in which all things are made new in the risen Christ. A tiny gleam of this is reflected in all true art. -- Evelyn Waugh
Its theme
the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters
was perhaps presumptuously large, but I make no apology for it. -- Evelyn Waugh
Downstairs Peter Beste-Chetwynde mixed himself another brandy and soda and turned a page in Havelock Ellis, which, next to The Wind in the Willows, was his favourite book. -- Evelyn Waugh
If only people realized Corbusier is pure nineteenth century, Manchester school utilitarian, and that's why they like him. -- Evelyn Waugh
The truth is that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up. -- Evelyn Waugh
I returned to London in the spring of 1926 for the General Strike. It was the topic of Paris. The French, exultant as always at the discomfiture of their former friends, and transposing into their own precise terms our mistier notions from across the Channel, foretold revolution and civil -- Evelyn Waugh
The sky over London was glorious, ochre and madder, as though a dozen tropic suns were simultaneously setting round the horizon ... Everywhere the shells sparkled like Christmas baubles. -- Evelyn Waugh
One has to regard a man as a Master who can produce on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes to every page. -- Evelyn Waugh
Aesthetic value is often the by-product of the artist striving to do something else. -- Evelyn Waugh
From the earliest times the Welsh have been looked upon as an unclean people. It is thus that they have preserved their racial integrity. Their sons and daughters rarely mate with humankind except their own blood relations. -- Evelyn Waugh
Mr. Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in. -- Evelyn Waugh
I am sorry to disturb you,' said James politely, 'but these people wished to shoot us. -- Evelyn Waugh
To see Stephen Spender fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee. -- Evelyn Waugh
Free as air; that's what they say- "free as air". Now they bring me my air in an iron barrel. -- Evelyn Waugh
MGM bores me when I see them, but I don't see them much. They have been a help in getting me introductions to morticians, who are the only people worth knowing. -- Evelyn Waugh
As there was no form of government common to the peoples thus segregated, nor tie of language, history, habit or belief, they were called a Republic. -- Evelyn Waugh
I have lived carefully, sheltered myself from the cold winds, eaten moderately of what was in season, drunk fine claret, slept in my own sheets; I shall live long. -- Evelyn Waugh
When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning. -- Evelyn Waugh
Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity. -- Evelyn Waugh
[ ... ] a sigh fit for the pillow, the sinking firelight, and a bedroom window open to the stars and the whisper of bare trees. -- Evelyn Waugh
At the door fo the dining-room he left us. 'Good night, Mr Jorkins,' he said. 'I hope you will pay us another visit when you next "cross the herring pond".' 'I say, what did your governor mean by that? He seemed almost to think I was American.' 'He's rather odd at times. -- Evelyn Waugh
Cordelia: I hope I've got a vocation.
Charles: I don't know what that means.
Cordelia: It means you can be a nun. If you haven't a vocation it's no good however much you want to be; and if you have a vocation, you can't get away from it, however much you hate it. -- Evelyn Waugh
I can quite understand that many people may be depressed by the spectacle of naked humanity. Personally I cannot see that an ugly body is any more offensive than an ugly dress. -- Evelyn Waugh
There was a change in both of us. We had lost a sense of discovery which had infused the anarchy of our first year. -- Evelyn Waugh
We are American at puberty. We die French. -- Evelyn Waugh
Quomondo sedet sola civitas. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. -- Evelyn Waugh
The Grace of God is in courtesy'; -- Evelyn Waugh
Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.'
William Boot -- Evelyn Waugh
I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember. -- Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh: How do you get your main pleasure in life, Sir William?
Sir William Beveridge: I get mine trying to leave the world a better place than I found it.
Waugh: I get mine spreading alarm and despondency and I get more satisfaction than you do. -- Evelyn Waugh
I haven't been to sleep for over a year. That's why I go to bed early. One needs more rest if one doesn't sleep. -- Evelyn Waugh
Oh, I shouldn't try to teach them anything, not just yet, anyway. Just keep them quiet. -- Evelyn Waugh
Rex has never been unkind to me intentionally. It's just that he isn't a real person at all; he's just a few faculties of a man highly developed; the rest simply isn't there. -- Evelyn Waugh
Medical science has oppressed us with a new huge burden of longevity. It is in that last undesired decade, when passion is cold, appetites feeble, curiosity dulled and experience has begotten cynicism, that accidia lies in wait as the final temptation to destruction. -- Evelyn Waugh
There is nothing to be gained by multiplying social distinctions indefinitely. -- Evelyn Waugh
He took a large tablet of beet sugar (an equivalent quantity of ordinary lump sugar does equally well) and soaked it in Angostura Bitters and then rolled it in Cayenne pepper. This he put into a large glass which he filled up with champagne. The excellences of this drink defy description. -- Evelyn Waugh
It is a curious thing ... that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste. -- Evelyn Waugh
One can write, think and pray exclusively of others; dreams are all egocentric. -- Evelyn Waugh
A work of art is not a matter of thinking beautiful thoughts or experiencing tender emotions , but of intelligence, skill, taste, proportion, knowledge, discipline and industry; especially discipline. -- Evelyn Waugh
Yes, cider and tinned salmon are the staple diet of the agricultural classes. -- Evelyn Waugh
My sister Cordelia's last report said that she was not only the worst girl in the school, but the worst there had ever been in the memory of the oldest nun. -- Evelyn Waugh
I said to the doctor, who was with us daily. 'He's got a wonderful will to live, hasn't he?'
'Would you put it like that? I should say a great fear of death.'
'Is there a difference?'
'Oh dear, yes. He doesn't derive any strength from his fear, you know. It's wearing him out. -- Evelyn Waugh
My father from long habit took a book with him to the table and then, remembering my presence, furtively dropped it under his chair. -- Evelyn Waugh
He did not fail in love, but he lost the joy of it [...] -- Evelyn Waugh
I never can understand how two men can write a book together; to me that's like three people getting together to have a baby. -- Evelyn Waugh
Never get mixed up in a Welsh wrangle. It doesn't end in blows like an Irish one, but goes on forever. -- Evelyn Waugh
In that dark hour I was aghast to realise that something within me, long sickening, had quietly died. I suddenly knew I had no desire or tenderness or esteem. Nothing remained except the chill bonds of law and duty an custom. -- Evelyn Waugh
Its a rather pleasant change when all your life you've had people looking after you, to have someone to look after yourself. Only of course it has to be someone pretty hopeless to need looking after by me. -- Evelyn Waugh
Money is only useful when you get rid of it. It is like the odd card in 'Old Maid'; the player who is finally left with it has lost. -- Evelyn Waugh
I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective. -- Evelyn Waugh
Comparisons are odious. -- Evelyn Waugh
I'm one of the blind alleys off the main road of procreation. -- Evelyn Waugh
After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can't trust a person. -- Evelyn Waugh
I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels. -- Evelyn Waugh
There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair. -- Evelyn Waugh
You can't ever tell what's going to hurt people. -- Evelyn Waugh
Adore having you. It's only Ian; he was saying tonight he wondered if you wouldn't feel more comfortable if you paid something ... -- Evelyn Waugh
I suppose it's something to do with her black-brained religion not to take care of the body. -- Evelyn Waugh
You seem to find everything banal." "it's a new word whose correct use i have only lately learnt,' said josephine with dignity. 'i find it applies to nearly everything. -- Evelyn Waugh
Soon someone would say the fatal words, Well, I think it's time for me to go to bed. -- Evelyn Waugh
If a thing's worth doing at all, it's worth doing well. -- Evelyn Waugh
If Brideshead Revisited is not a great book, it's so like a great book that many of us, at least while reading it, find it hard to tell the difference. -- Evelyn Waugh
I've usually found every Catholic family has one lapsed member, and it's often the nicest. -- Evelyn Waugh
It's a great thing in life to have a place you can't be moved from - too few of them -- Evelyn Waugh
They are a very decent generous lot of people out here and they don't expect you to listen ... It's the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard. -- Evelyn Waugh
News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead. -- Evelyn Waugh
Port is not for the very young, the vain and the active. It is the comfort of age and the companion of the scholar and the philosopher -- Evelyn Waugh
Winston Churchill is always expecting rabbits to come out of an empty hat. -- Evelyn Waugh
Then there was the concert where the boys refused to sing 'God Save the King' because of the pudding they had had for luncheon. One way and another, I have been consistently unfortunate in my efforts at festivity. And yet I look forward to each new fiasco with the utmost relish. -- Evelyn Waugh
The languor of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! -- Evelyn Waugh
That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty. -- Evelyn Waugh
Anyone could write a novel given six weeks, pen paper, and no telephone or wife. -- Evelyn Waugh
Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist. -- Evelyn Waugh
I have a good mind not to take Aloysius to Venice. I don't want him to meet a lot of horrid Italian bears and pick up bad habits. -- Evelyn Waugh
[f]ortune is the lease capricious of deities, and arranges things on the just and rigid system that no one shall be very happy for very long. -- Evelyn Waugh
I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world. -- Evelyn Waugh
Faster ... Faster ... it'll stop all right when the time comes ... -- Evelyn Waugh
Beware of writing to me. I always answer ... My father spent the last 20 years of his life writing letters. If someone thanked him for a wedding present, he thanked them for thanking him and there was no end to the exchange but death. -- Evelyn Waugh
The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish. -- Evelyn Waugh
I've just been to Greece to see the buildings there,' said Professor Silenus. 'Did you like them?' 'They are unspeakably ugly. But there were some nice goats. -- Evelyn Waugh
If one's object is ascetic, it is far better to stay in London or Paris or New York; there is practically no extreme of heat or cold, physical risk, loneliness, hunger or thirst that cannot, with a little ingenuity, be conveniently achieved in the centres of civilization. -- Evelyn Waugh
This war has begun in darkness and it will end in silence. -- Evelyn Waugh
What is it about being on a boat that makes everyone behave like a film star?
Julia Flyte -- Evelyn Waugh
A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it. -- Evelyn Waugh
Other nations use 'force'; we Britons alone use 'Might'. -- Evelyn Waugh
When the waterholes were dry, people sought to drink at the mirage. -- Evelyn Waugh
It may happen in the next hundred years that the English novelists of the present day will come to be valued as we now value the artists and craftsmen of the late eighteenth century. -- Evelyn Waugh
Well, you see, she was saintly but she wasn't a saint. No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can't really hate God either. When they want to hate him and his saints they have to find something like themselves and pretend it's God and hate that. I suppose you think that's all bosh. -- Evelyn Waugh
Remember that, however patient your study, you will never in adult life learn any language perfectly; the best you can hope for is to be a bore. -- Evelyn Waugh
We can trace almost all the disasters of English history to the influence of Wales. -- Evelyn Waugh
Ah well, to the journalist every country is rich. -- Evelyn Waugh
Here it seemed some of them slept for there were divan beds covered with blankets only and a large, much undenticulated, comb. -- Evelyn Waugh
My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally. -- Evelyn Waugh
She had heard someone say something about an Independent Labour Party, and was furious that she had not been asked. -- Evelyn Waugh
When we argue for our limitations, we get to keep them. -- Evelyn Waugh
Beware the Anglo-Catholics. They're all sodomites with unpleasant accents." --Cousin Jasper -- Evelyn Waugh
His heart; some long word at the heart. He is dying of a long word. -- Evelyn Waugh
I [had] added another small piece to the pages of the atlas that were real to me. -- Evelyn Waugh
There will be a prize of half a crown for the longest essay, irrespective of any possible merit. -- Evelyn Waugh
Of children as of procreation
the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable -- Evelyn Waugh
He delighted in writing, in the joinery and embellishment of his sentences, in the consciousness of high rare virtue when every word had been used in its purest and most precise sense, in the kitten games of syntax and rhetoric. Words could do anything except generate their own meaning. -- Evelyn Waugh
We think it a very promising little war. A microcosm, as you might say, of world drama. -- Evelyn Waugh
Frankly," said the Doctor, "I am at a loss to understand my own emotions. I can think of no entertainment that fills me with greater detestation than a display of competitive athletics, none - except possibly folk dancing. -- Evelyn Waugh
She was daily surprised by the things he knew and the things he did not know; both, at the time, added to his attraction. -- Evelyn Waugh
Any one who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums, Paul learned, who find prison so soul destroying. -- Evelyn Waugh
Prescribed exercise, still ran through boskage between the partisan bivouacs. The circle of villas in the outskirts of the town abandoned precipitately by their owners had been allotted by the partisans to various official purposes. In the largest of these the Russian mission lurked invisibly. -- Evelyn Waugh
I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence. -- Evelyn Waugh
My father greeted me with his usual air of mild regret. -- Evelyn Waugh
Literature is the right use of language irrespective of the subject or reason of utterance. -- Evelyn Waugh
You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs except in England, of course. -- Evelyn Waugh
Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm? -- Evelyn Waugh
There is a species of person called a 'Modern Churchman' who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief. -- Evelyn Waugh
So through a world of piety I made my way to Sebastian. -- Evelyn Waugh
Pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom. -- Evelyn Waugh
Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases. -- Evelyn Waugh
I've always had two principles throughout all my life in motion-pictures: never do before the camera what you would not do at home and never do at home what you would not do before the camera. -- Evelyn Waugh
Ought we to be drunk every night?" Sebastian asked one morning.
"Yes, I think so."
"I think so too. -- Evelyn Waugh
His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing, and jazz
everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime. The tiny kindling of charity which came to him through his religion sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom ... -- Evelyn Waugh
The Second World War wasn't bad provided you were with nice people. -- Evelyn Waugh
Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic. -- Evelyn Waugh
Now we shall both be alone, and I shall have no way of making you understand.'
'I don't want to make it easier for you,' I said; 'I hope your heart may break; but I do understand. -- Evelyn Waugh
No one is ever holy without suffering. -- Evelyn Waugh
How ungenerously in later life we disclaim the virtuous moods of our youth, living in retrospect long, summer days of unreflecting dissipation. -- Evelyn Waugh
There are two distinct kinds of meanness - those which come of loving money and of disliking it. Mine was the latter sort. -- Evelyn Waugh
Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now. -- Evelyn Waugh
You spend the first term at Oxford meeting interesting and exciting people and the rest of your time there avoiding them -- Evelyn Waugh
Wine is a bride who brings a great dowry to the man who woos her persistently and gracefully. -- Evelyn Waugh
The most futile and disastrous day seems well spent when it is reviewed through the blue, fragrant smoke of a Havana Cigar. -- Evelyn Waugh
Don't hold your parents up to contempt. After all, you are their son, and it is just possible that you may take after them. -- Evelyn Waugh
That day was the beginning of my friendship with Sebastian, and thus it came about, that morning in June, that I was lying beside him in the shade of the high elms watching the smoke from his lips drift up into the branches. -- Evelyn Waugh
O God, make me good, but not yet. -- Evelyn Waugh
Have you at any time been detained in a mental home or similar institution? If so, give particulars.'
'I was at Scone College, Oxford, for two years,' said Paul. -- Evelyn Waugh
The cream and hot butter mingled and overflowed separating each glucose bead of caviar from its fellows, capping it in white and gold. -- Evelyn Waugh
The tour bus was supposed to be here ten minutes ago. Would it be possible to give them a ring to check they've not forgotten us? -- Evelyn Waugh
Up to a point, Lord Copper. -- Evelyn Waugh
He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich. -- Evelyn Waugh
An artist must be a reactionary -- Evelyn Waugh
'I will not stand for being called a woman in my own house' she said. -- Evelyn Waugh
The only thing that it is advisable to know in any language is the numerals; and even there, you can do a lot with the fingers. -- Evelyn Waugh
Brenda descended the great staircase step by step through alternations of dusk and rainbow. -- Evelyn Waugh
Punctuality is the virtue of the bored. -- Evelyn Waugh
Chokey cholmondley: "i sure am crazy about culture". -- Evelyn Waugh
Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction. -- Evelyn Waugh
Here I am,' I thought, 'back from the jungle, back from the ruins. Here, where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity. -- Evelyn Waugh
I am annoyed to find myself continually described by people whom I have never set eyes on as bad-tempered. -- Evelyn Waugh
I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners. -- Evelyn Waugh
Virginia's son was born on June 4th, the day on which all allied armies entered Rome. -- Evelyn Waugh
There is practically no sense that is not violated every time we return from the country or the sea to Paris or London or New York. -- Evelyn Waugh
My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless. -- Evelyn Waugh
You could appreciate the beauty of the world by trying to paint it. -- Evelyn Waugh
We schoolmasters must temper discretion with deceit. -- Evelyn Waugh
...that kernel of gaiety that never breaks. -- Evelyn Waugh
There is no ordinary run of mankind, there are only individuals who are totally different. And whether a man is naked and black and stands on one foot in Sudan or is clothed in some kind of costume in a bus in England, they are still individuals of entirely different characters. -- Evelyn Waugh
The understatement, the self-ridicule, the delight in the foreignness of foreigners, the complete denial of any attempt to enlist the sympathies of his readers in the hardships he has capriciously invited. -- Evelyn Waugh
Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth. -- Evelyn Waugh
That is not the last word; it is not even an apt word; it is a dead word from ten years back. -- Evelyn Waugh
Suffering is none the less acute and much more lasting when it is put into words. -- Evelyn Waugh
We possess nothing certainly except the past -- Evelyn Waugh
Had he not suffered unscathed the fearful dooms of all the offended gods, of all the histories, fire, brimstone, and yawning earthquakes, plague, and pestilence? Had he not stood, like the Pompeian sentry, while the Citadels of the Plain fell to ruin about his ears? -- Evelyn Waugh
Success in this world depends on knowing exactly how little effort each job is worth ... distribution of energy ... -- Evelyn Waugh
There is something incomparably thrilling in first opening a brand new book. -- Evelyn Waugh
Next morning at first light to Guy's surprise the troopship at last emerged from the haze of myth and was seen to be solidly at anchor beyond the mouth of the harbor. -- Evelyn Waugh
It would be a dull world if we all thought alike. -- Evelyn Waugh
To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom. -- Evelyn Waugh
The audiences certainly have [declined]. If I go to the theatre now I find people come there to eat and smoke and talk to one another. And look like scarecrows. -- Evelyn Waugh
Instruction would be wasted on me. Just to give me the form and I'll sign on the dotted line. -- Evelyn Waugh
I put the words down and push them a bit. -- Evelyn Waugh
There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances. -- Evelyn Waugh
For in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy. -- Evelyn Waugh
Here my last love had died. -- Evelyn Waugh
The splendid thing about education is that everyone wants it. Like influenza, you can give it away without losing any of it yourself. -- Evelyn Waugh
It was as though Banquo had turned host. -- Evelyn Waugh
Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker. -- Evelyn Waugh
Saints are simply men and women who have fulfilled their natural obligation which is to approach God. -- Evelyn Waugh
Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography. -- Evelyn Waugh
Beerbohm was a genius of the purest kind. He stands at the summit of his art. -- Evelyn Waugh
If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be -- Evelyn Waugh
It doesn't matter what people call you unless they call you pigeon pie and eat you up. -- Evelyn Waugh
I can't bare you when you're not amusing. -- Evelyn Waugh
[Change is] the only evidence of life. -- Evelyn Waugh
I have no technical psychological interest; it is drama, speech,and events that interest me. -- Evelyn Waugh
We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them. -- Evelyn Waugh
If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside. -- Evelyn Waugh
six black Cordelias -- Evelyn Waugh
I think there's almost nothing I can't excuse except perhaps worshiping graven images. That seems to be idiotic. -- Evelyn Waugh
Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression. -- Evelyn Waugh
What is youth except a man or woman before it is ready or fit to be seen? -- Evelyn Waugh
I'm quite deaf now; such a comfort. -- Evelyn Waugh
