Evelyn Waugh Quotes

O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin.

Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.

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.

If it could only be like this always - always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper.

There is something incomparably thrilling in first opening a brand new book.

You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs except in England, of course.

My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.

I think there's almost nothing I can't excuse except perhaps worshiping graven images. That seems to be idiotic.

The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are.

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.

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

I can't bare you when you're not amusing.

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.

I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners.

Once you start changing a name, you see, there's no reason ever to stop. One always hears one that sounds better.

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.

Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?

What is youth except a man or a woman before it is ready or fit to be seen.

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

He did not fail in love, but he lost the joy of it [...]

No one is ever holy without suffering.

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

News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read.

I put the words down and push them a bit.

I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed.

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

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.

Free as air; that's what they say- "free as air". Now they bring me my air in an iron barrel.

Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.

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.

An artist must be a reactionary

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.

If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.

'I don't believe you've changed at all, Charles.' 'No, I'm afraid not.' 'D'you want to change?' 'It's the only evidence of life.'

Beavers bred in captivity, inhabiting a concrete pool, will, if given the timber, fatuously go through all the motions of damming an ancestral stream.

She had heard someone say something about an Independent Labour Party, and was furious that she had not been asked.

In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice.

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

Of children as of procreation -- the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable

He had no strength for any other war than his own solitary struggle to keep alive.

To understand all is to forgive all.

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

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.

Self-sufficiency at home, self-assertion abroad.

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. We possess nothing certainly except the past.

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

...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 can't ever tell what's going to hurt people.

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.

The great charm in argument is really finding one's own opinions, not other people's.