"Punctuality is the virtue of the bored."
— Evelyn Waugh

"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)

"After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can't trust a person."
— Evelyn Waugh (Vile Bodies)

"To understand all is to forgive all."
— 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)

"We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them."
— Evelyn Waugh

"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)

"There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair."
— Evelyn Waugh (Vile Bodies)

"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)

"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)

"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)

"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

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

"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)

"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)

"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

"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)

"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

"I can't bare you when you're not amusing."
— Evelyn Waugh (Vile Bodies)

"All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day."
— 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)

"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)

"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

"[Change is] the only evidence of life."
— Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited)

"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

"Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything. "
— Evelyn Waugh

"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."
— Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited)

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

"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)

"He did not fail in love, but he lost the joy of it [...]"
— Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited)

"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)

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

"Wine is a bride who brings a great dowry to the man who woos her persistently and gracefully."
— Evelyn Waugh

"He was talking very excitedly to me," said the Vicar, "about some apparatus for warming a church in Worthing and about the Apostolic Claims of the Church of Abyssinia. I confess I could not follow him clearly. He seems deeply interested in Church matters. Are you quite sure he is right in the head? I have noticed again and again since I have been in the Church that lay interest in ecclesiastical matters is often a prelude to insanity."
— Evelyn Waugh

"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."
— 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

"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)

"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)

"The languor of youth-how unique and quintessential it is! how quickly, and 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; again and again in riper years we experience, under a new stimulus, what we thought had been finally left behind, the authentic impulse to action, the renewal of power and its concentration on a new subject; again and again a new truth is revealed to us in whose light all our previous knowledge must be rearranged. "
— Evelyn Waugh

"Don't you think," said Father Rothschild gently, "that perhaps it is all in some way historical? I don't think people ever want to lose their faith either in religion or anything else. I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence. I think all these divorces show that. People aren't content just to muddle along nowadays ... And this word "bogus" they all use ... They won't make the best of a bad job nowadays. My private schoolmaster used to say, "If a thing's worth doing at all, it's worth doing well." My Church has taught that in different words for several centuries. But these young people have got hold of another end of the stick, and for all we know it may be the right one. They say, "If a thing's not worth doing well, it's not worth doing at all." It makes everything very difficult for them."
— Evelyn Waugh (Vile Bodies)

"Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.
"
— Evelyn Waugh

"Money is only useful when you get rid of it. It is like the odd card in Old Maid; the player who is finally with it has lost."
— Evelyn Waugh

"...we possess nothing certainly except the past."
— Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited)

"that is not the last word; it is not even an apt word; it is a dead word from ten years back."
— Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited)

"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)

"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

"Ten men of revolting appearance were approaching from the drive. They were low of brow, crafty of eye, and crooked of limb. They advanced huddled together with the loping tread of wolves, peering about them furtively as they came, as though in constant terror of ambush; they slavered at their mouths, which hung loosely over the receding chins, while each clutched under his ape-like arm a burden of curious and unaccountable shape. On seeing the Doctor they halted and edged back, those behind squinting and moulting over the companions' shoulders."
— Evelyn Waugh