Evelyn Waugh quotes - page 6

Nice to go to Rome. They are destroying all that was superficially attractive about my Church. It is a great sorrow to me and for once undeserved. If you see Cardinal Bea spit in his eye. (Evelyn Waugh)
[M]y friends and I are totally at a loss to understand the new form of the Mass... Every attendance at Mass leaves me without comfort or edification. I shall never, pray God, apostatize but church-going is now a bitter trial.
Evelyn Waugh
I go to Rome for Easter (Grand Hotel) to avoid the horrors of the English liturgy.
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
'But what am I to teach them?' said Paul in sudden panic.
Evelyn Waugh
What is this impulse of two people to build their beastly home? It's you & me, unborn, asserting our presence. All we are is a manifestation of the impulse to family life, and if by chance we have escaped the itch ourselves, Nature forces it upon us another way. (Part One, Chapter XII)
Evelyn Waugh
Augustus Fagan, Esquire, Ph. D., Llanabba Castle, N. Wales, requires immediately junior assistant to teach Classics and English to University Standard with subsidiary Mathematics, German and French. Experience essential; first-class games essential... 'Might have been made for you,' said Mr Levy. '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
He had no strength for any other war than his own solitary struggle to keep alive.
Evelyn Waugh
He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending to be whole.
Evelyn Waugh
Enclosing every thin man, there's a fat man demanding elbow-room.
Evelyn Waugh
I've always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. ... Or it may be a private bargain between me and God, that if I give up this one thing I want so much, however bad I am, He won't quite despair of me in the end. (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
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
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
You spend the first term at Oxford meeting interesting and exciting people and the rest of your time there avoiding them.
Evelyn Waugh
If, for instance, they have heard something from the postman, they attribute it to ''a semi-official statement'' if they have fallen into conversation with a stranger at a bar, they can conscientiously describe him as ''a source that has hitherto proved unimpeachable.'' It is only when the journalist is reporting a whim of his own, and one to which he attaches minor importance, that he defines it as the opinion of ''well-informed circles.''
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
But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into the depths of confusion you didn't know existed.
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
Was anyone hurt? (Evelyn Waugh)
Comparisons are odious.
Evelyn Waugh
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
If politicians and scientist were lazier, how much happier we should all be.
Evelyn Waugh
It is not the state of slavery so much as the process of enslavement that is intolerable: and it is worth noting that the European slave trade was principally for the transport of people already enslaved. That is to say, the traders purchased captives from the warrior tribes. Undoubtedly the trade stimulated the raiding, but free blacks first captured other free blacks and then sold them to the whites.
Evelyn Waugh