Evelyn Waugh Quotes

Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.
Evelyn Waugh
Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.
Evelyn Waugh
We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us but for ours to amuse them.
Evelyn Waugh
We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us but for ours to amuse them.
Evelyn Waugh
Change is the only evidence of life.
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
...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
Ah well, to the journalist every country is rich.
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
As a rule there is one thing you can always count on in our job — popularity. There are plenty of disadvantages I grant you, but you are liked and respected. Ring people up any hour of the day or night, butt into their houses uninvited make them answer a string of damn fool questions when they want to do something else — they like it. Always a smile and the best of everything for the gentlemen of the Press.
Evelyn Waugh
...for in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.
Evelyn Waugh
Two wives despaired of him,’ he said. ‘When he got engaged to Sylvia, she made it a condition that he should take the cure at Zurich. And it worked. He came back in three months a different man. And he hasn't touched a drop since, even though Sylvia walked out on him.’ ‘Why did she do that?’Well, poor Charlie got rather a bore when he stopped drinking. But that’s not really the point of the story.
Evelyn Waugh
The way ran zigzag through a forest of pine which the bitter wind, still that morning, had turned to ice; every bough was adorned with lines of stalactite which shivered and glittered in the morning sun; every needle had a brilliant, vitreous case and when she flicked her whip at a wayside shrub she brought down a tinkling shower of ice-leaves, each the veined impression of its crisp, green counterpart.
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
Then they began saying, "Get hold of him. Put him in Mercury." Now as you know I have two sculptures by Brancusi and several pretty things and I did not want them to start getting rough, so I said, pacifically, "Dear sweet clodhoppers, if you knew anything of sexual psychology you would know that nothing could give me keener pleasure than to be manhandled by you meaty boys. It would be an ecstasy of the very naughtiest kind. So if any of you wishes to be my partner in joy come and seize me. If, on the other hand, you simply wish to satisfy some obscure and less easily classified libido and see me bathe, come with me quietly, dear louts, to the fountain.
Evelyn Waugh
I suppose it's something to do with her black-brained religion not to take care of the body.
Evelyn Waugh
It (modernization) is just another jungle closing in.
Evelyn Waugh
It was not her way to make a conspicuous entry into anyone’s life, but towards the end of that week Sebastian said rather sourly: “You and mummy seem very thick,” and I realized that in fact I was being drawn into intimacy by swift, imperceptible stages, for she was impatient of any human relationship that fell short of it.
Evelyn Waugh
I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.
Evelyn Waugh
Sebastian is in love with his own childhood. That will make him very unhappy.
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
My father greeted me with his usual air of mild regret.
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.
Evelyn Waugh
Instruction would be wasted on me. Just to give me the form and I'll sign on the dotted line.
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 [being very rich] used to worry me, and I thought it wrong to have so many beautiful things when others had nothing. Now I realize that it is possible for the rich to sin by coveting the privileges of the poor. The poor have always been the favourites of God and his saints, but I believe that is is one of the special achievements of Grace to sanctify the whole of life, riches included.
Evelyn Waugh
We, Seth, Emperor of Azania, Chief of the Chiefs of Sakuyu, Lord of Wanda and Tyrant of the Seas, Bachelor of the Arts of Oxford University, being in this the twenty-fourth year of our life, summoned by the wisdom of Almighty God and the unanimous voice of our people to the throne of our ancestors, do hereby proclaim...
Evelyn Waugh
We schoolmasters must temper discretion with deceit.
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
I was thinking about honour. It's a thing that changes doesn't it? I mean, a hundred and fifty years ago we would have had to fight if challenged. Now we'd laugh. There must have been a time when it was rather an awkward question.""Yes. Moral theologians were never able to stop dueling -- it took democracy to do that.""And in the next war, when we are completely democratic, I expect that it will be quite honourable for officers to leave their men behind. It'll be laid down in King's Regulations as their duty-- to keep a cadre going to train new men to take the place of prisoners.""Perhaps men wouldn't take too kindly to being trained by deserters.""Don't you think that they'd respect them more for being fly? I reckon our trouble is that we're in the awkward stage -- like a man challenged to a duel a hundred years ago.
Evelyn Waugh
The problem of architecture as I see it is the problem of all art – the elimination of the human element from the consideration of the form.
Evelyn Waugh
I walked down the empty Broad to breakfast, as I often did on Sundays, at a tea-shop opposite Balliol. The air was full of bells from the surrounding spires and the sun, casting long shadows across the open spaces, dispelled the fears of night. The tea-shop was hushed as a library; a few solitary men in bedroom slippers from Balliol and Trinity looked up as I entered, then turned back to their Sunday newspapers. I ate my scrambled eggs and bitter marmalade with the zest which in youth follows a restless night. I lit a cigarette and sat on, while one by one the Balliol and Trinity men paid their bills and shuffled away, slip-slop, across the street to their colleges. It was nearly eleven when I left, and during my walk I heard the change-ringing cease and, all over the town, give place to the single chime which warned the city that service was about to start.
Evelyn Waugh
It was a small tortoise with Julia’s initials set in diamonds in the living shell, and this slightly obscene object, now slipping impotently on the polished boards, now striding across the card-table, now lumbering over a rug, now withdrawn at a touch, now stretching its neck and swaying its withered, antediluvian head, became a memorable part of the evening, one of those needlehooks of experience which catch the attention when larger matters are at stake.
Evelyn Waugh
The languor of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost!
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
The langour of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth - all save this come and go with us through life...These things are a part of life itself; but languor - the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding, the sun standing still in the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse - that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it.
Evelyn Waugh
If it could only be like this always – always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper...
Evelyn Waugh
Civilization – and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organization of Europe – has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity, and without it has no significance or power to command allegiance…That is the first discovery, that Christianity is essential to civilization and that it is in greater need of combative strength than it has been for centuries.
Evelyn Waugh
He was not at all what is called ‘a character’. He was an innocent, affable old man who had somehow preserved his good humor – much more than that, a mysterious and tranquil joy – throughout a life which to all outward observation had been overloaded with misfortune. He had like many another been born in full sunlight and lived to see night fall.
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
You can't ever tell what's going to hurt people.
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
So through a world of piety I made my way to Sebastian.
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
He lay back for a little in his bed thinking about the smells of food… of the intoxicating breath of bakeries and dullness of buns… He planned dinners, of enchanting aromatic foods… endless dinners, in which one could alternate flavor with flavor from sunset to dawn without satiety, while one breathed great draughts of the bouquet of brandy.
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
When the waterholes were dry, people sought to drink at the mirage.
Evelyn Waugh
No one is ever holy without suffering.
Evelyn Waugh
Do you want to change?" "It's the only evidence of life.
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 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
My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark's, theywere everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder or pecking a broken biscuit from between my lips; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that morning.These memories are the memorials and pledges of the vital hours of a lifetime. These hours of afflatus in the human spirit, the springs of art, are, in their mystery, akin to the epochs of history, when a race which for centuries has lived content, unknown, behind its own frontiers, digging, eating, sleeping, begetting, doing what was requisite for survival and nothing else, will, for a generation or two, stupefy the world; commit all manner of crimes, perhaps; follow the wildest chimeras, go down in the end in agony, but leave behind a record of new heights scaled and new rewards won for all mankind; the vision fades, the soul sickens, and the routine of survival starts again.The human soul enjoys these rare, classic periods, but, apart from them, we are seldom single or unique; we keep company in this world with a hoard of abstractions and reflections and counterfeits of ourselves -- the sensual man, the economic man, the man of reason, the beast, the machine and the sleep-walker, and heaven knows what besides, all in our own image, indistinguishable from ourselves to the outward eye. We get borne along, out of sight in the press, unresisting, till we get the chance to drop behind unnoticed, or to dodge down a side street, pause, breathe freely and take our bearings, or to push ahead, out-distance our shadows, lead them a dance, so that when at length they catch up with us, they look at one another askance, knowing we have a secret we shall never share.
Evelyn Waugh
You'll find you spend half your second year shaking off the undesirable friends you made in your first...
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
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
I knew it all, the whole drab compass of marital disillusion; we had been through it together, the Army and I, from the first importunate courtship until now, when nothing remained to us except the chill bonds of law and duty and custom. I had played every scene in the domestic tragedy, had found the early tiffs become more frequent, the tears less affecting, the reconciliations less sweet, tell they engendered a mood of aloofness and cool criticism, and the growing conviction that it was not myself but the loved one who was at fault. I caught the false notes in her voice and learned to listen for them apprehensively; I recognized the blank, resentful stare of incomprehension in her eyes, and the selfish, hard set of the corners of her mouth. I learned her, as one must learn a woman one has kept house with, day in, day out, for three and a half years; I learned her slatternly ways, the routine and mechanism of her charm, her jealousy and self-seeking, and her nervous trick with the fingers when she was lying. She was stripped of all enchantment now and I knew her for an uncongenial stranger to whom I had bound myself indissolubly in a moment of folly.
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
There is nothing to be gained by multiplying social distinctions indefinitely.
Evelyn Waugh
My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.
Evelyn Waugh
All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day.
Evelyn Waugh