Evelyn Waugh > Quotes

“Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.”
― Evelyn Waugh

“After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can't trust a person.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies

“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, Brideshead Revisited

“Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“If it could only be like this always – always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper...”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“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.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“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, Brideshead Revisited

“The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what's been taught and what's been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn't know existed.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“To understand all is to forgive all.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies

“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, Brideshead Revisited

“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, Brideshead Revisited

“There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies

“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.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them.”
― 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, they were 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.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“For in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.”
― 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, Brideshead Revisited

“No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can't really hate God either. When they want to Hate Him and His saints they have to find something like themselves and pretends it's God and hate that.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred And Profane Memories Of Captain Charles Ryder

“These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“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.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.”
― Evelyn Waugh

“Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything. ”
― Evelyn Waugh

“[Change is] the only evidence of life.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“O God, make me good, but not yet.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“I can't bare you when you're not amusing.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies

“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

“He did not fail in love, but he lost the joy of it [...]”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman's day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days - such as that day - when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamour.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“His heart; some long word at the heart. He is dying of a long word.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“Soon someone would say the fatal words, "Well, I think it’s time for me to go to bed.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies

“When we argue for our limitations, we get to keep them.”
― Evelyn Waugh

“Evelyn Waugh: How do you get your main pleasure in life, Sir William?
Sir William Beveridge: I get mine trying to leave the world a better place than I found it.
Waugh: I get mine spreading alarm and despondency and I get more satisfaction than you do.”
― Evelyn Waugh

“Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.”
― 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

“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 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, Brideshead Revisited

“No one is ever holy without suffering.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“... To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

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

“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

“...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, Brideshead Revisited

“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, Brideshead Revisited

“...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.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“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

“In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice.”
― Evelyn Waugh

“The anguished suspense of watching the lips you hunger for, framing the words, the death sentence, of sheer triteness!”
― Evelyn Waugh

“The human soul enjoys these rare, classical 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 sleepwalker, and heaven knows what besides, all in our own image, indistinguishable from ourselves to the outside 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 sides treet, pause, breathe freely and take our bearings, or to push ahead, outdistance 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, Brideshead Revisited

“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, Brideshead Revisited