The Sword of Honour Trilogy Quotes

“What is adolescence without trash?”
― Evelyn Waugh, The Sword of Honour Trilogy

“Guy left the office unashamed. He felt shaken, as though he had seen a road accident in which he was not concerned. His fingers shook but it was nerves not conscience which troubled him; he was familiar with shame; this trembling, hopeless sense of disaster was something of quite another order; something that would pass and leave no mark.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honor Trilogy

“Most English gentlemen at this time believed that they had a particular aptitude for endearing themselves to the lower classes. Guy was not troubled by this illusion, but he believed he was rather liked by these particular thirty men. He did not greatly care.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honor Trilogy

“We don’t get much time to read the papers.” “No, I suppose you don’t. I envy you. There’s nothing in them but lies,” he added sadly. “You can’t believe a word they say. But it’s all good. Very good indeed. It helps to keep one’s spirits up,” he said from the depths of his gloom.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honor Trilogy

“Next morning at first light to Guy’s surprise the troopship at last emerged from the haze of myth and was seen to be solidly at anchor beyond the mouth of the harbor.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honor Trilogy

“Colonel Campbell was much bedizened with horn and cairngorms. He wore a velvet doublet above his kilt, high stiff collar and a black bow tie. Mrs Campbell wore nothing memorable.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honour

“Is there any place that is free from evil? It is too simple to say that only the Nazis wanted war. These communists wanted it too. It was the only way in which they could come to power. Many of my people wanted it, to be revenged on the Germans, to hasten the creation of the national state. It seems to me there was a will to war, a death wish, everywhere. Even good men thought their private honour would be satisfied by war. They could assert their manhood by killing and being killed. They would accept hardships in recompense for having been selfish and lazy. Danger justified privilege. I knew Italians – not very many perhaps – who felt this. Were there none in England?’ ‘God forgive me,’ said Guy. ‘I was one of them.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honour

“Here the girls danced together in the winter evenings to the music of the wireless and tender possessive friendships were contracted and repudiated;”
― Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honour

“The temptation for Guy, which he resisted as best he could, was to brood on his own bereavement and deplore the countless occasions of his life when he had failed his father. That was not what he was here for. There would be ample time in the years to come for these selfish considerations.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honour

“I’m bound to say your Cardinal Hinsley did a wonderful job of work on the wireless. You could see he was an Englishman first and a Christian second; that is more than you can say of one or two of our bishops.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honour

“I personally have no doubt,’ he said, ‘and I am confirmed in my opinion by many reports, that great encouragement is given to our allies and sympathizers throughout the world by the survival’ (laughter) ‘in this country of what is almost unique in present conditions, a periodical entirely independent of official direction.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honour

“There should be a drug for soldiers, Guy thought, to put them to sleep until they were needed. They should repose among the briar like the knights of the Sleeping Beauty; they should be laid away in their boxes in the nursery cupboard. This unvarying cycle of excitement and disappointment rubbed them bare of paint and exposed the lead beneath.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honour

“Premature examination of his files might ruin his private, undefined Plan. Somewhere in the ultimate curlicues of his mind, there was a Plan. Given time, given enough confidential material, he would succeed in knitting the entire quarrelsome world into a single net of conspiracy in which there were no antagonists, merely millions of men working, unknown to one another, for the same end; and there would be no more war.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honour

“I must visualize the scene, Apthorpe. When we are old men, memories of things like this will be our chief comfort.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honor Trilogy