Evelyn Waugh quotes - page 4

A copy of Dante's Purgatorio excited his especial disgust."French, eh?" he said. "I guessed as much, and pretty dirty too, I shouldn't wonder. Now just you wait while I look up these here books"-how he said it!-"in my list. Particularly against books the Home Secretary is. If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside." (Evelyn Waugh)
It's the seed of life we carry about with us like our skeletons, each one of us unconsciously pregnant with desirable villa residences. There's no escape. As individuals we simply do not exist. We are just potential home builders, beavers, and ants. How do we come into being? What is birth?
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
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
I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners.
Evelyn Waugh
Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.
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
Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.
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
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
We schoolmasters must temper discretion with deceit. (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
Soon someone would say the fatal words, "Well, I think it's time for me to go to bed.
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 can't bare you when you're not amusing.
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
[Change is] the only evidence of life.
Evelyn Waugh
After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can't trust a person.
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
... for in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.
Evelyn Waugh
Tomorrow and on every anniversary as long as the Happier Hunting Ground existed a postcard would go to Mr. Joyboy: Your little Aimée is wagging her tail in heaven tonight, thinking of you. (Evelyn Waugh)
Was anyone hurt?" "No one I am thankful to say," said Mrs. Beaver, "except two housemaids who lost their heads and jumped through a glass roof into the paved court.
Evelyn Waugh
"I have been here before," I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.
Evelyn Waugh
There is a great deal to be said for the Arts. For one thing they offer the only career in which commercial failure is not necessarily discreditable.
Evelyn Waugh
...I wonder if you remember the story mummy read us the evening Sebastian first got drunk - I mean the bad evening. "Father Brown" said something like "I caught him" (the thief) "with an unseen hook and and invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread."
Evelyn Waugh