Evelyn Waugh Quotes

The languor of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost!

These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me.

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.

I do not believe the expenditure of $2.50 for a book entitles the purchaser to the personal friendship of the author.

My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.

I'm one of the blind alleys off the main road of procreation.

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.

Saints are simply men & women who have fulfilled their natural obligation which is to approach God.

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.

Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.

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.

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.

Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.

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.

O God, make me good, but not yet.

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.

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.

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.

She told me later that she had made a kind of note of me in her mind, as, scanning the shelf for a particular book, one will sometimes have one's attention caught by another, take it down, glance at the title page and saying "I must read that, too, when I've the time," replace it and continue the search.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor [group think] of the age and not go flopping along. By doing this he helps us to question and reassess our past, present and future situations, our assumptions and our options.

Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now.

...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.

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.

It is a curious thing... that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.

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?

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.

Suffering is none the less acute and much more lasting when it is put into words.

I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence.

Anyone could write a novel given six weeks, pen paper, and no telephone or wife.

Dearest Charles-- I found a box of this paper at the back of a bureau so I must write to you as I am mourning for my lost innocence. It never looked like living. The doctors despaired of it from the start... I am never quite alone. Members of my family keep turning up and collecting luggage and going away again, but the white raspberries are ripe. 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. Love or what you will. S.

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.

Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases.

It doesn't matter what people call you unless they call you pigeon pie and eat you up.

The most futile and disastrous day seems well spent when it is reviewed through the blue, fragrant smoke of a Havana Cigar.

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.

...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?

You spend the first term at Oxford meeting interesting and exciting people and the rest of your time there avoiding them

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.

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.

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.

We can trace almost all the disasters of English history to the influence of Wales.

How ungenerously in later life we disclaim the virtuous moods of our youth, living in retrospect long, summer days of unreflecting dissipation.

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

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.

A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.

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.

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.

Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker.