Waugh Evelyn Quotes & Sayings

No one is ever holy without suffering. — Evelyn Waugh

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

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

I am suing Lord Beaverbrook for libel and hope for some lovely tax-free money in damages. He has very conveniently told some lies about me. — Evelyn Waugh

I never see you now,' she said. 'I never seem to see anyone I like. I don't know why.'
But she spoke as though it were a matter of weeks rather than of years; as though, too, before our parting we had been firm friends. It was dead contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the tangle of wire. — Evelyn Waugh

I sometimes think if I had gone to Oxford or Cambridge and looked like a handsome young guy who could be in an Evelyn Waugh novel or something, I'd be a massive movie star. But there's a longevity to what I do. It's more reliable. Someone isn't deciding that I'm the next big thing. — Eddie Marsan

The sky over London was glorious, ochre and madder, as though a dozen tropic suns were simultaneously setting round the horizon ... Everywhere the shells sparkled like Christmas baubles. — Evelyn Waugh

Rex has never been unkind to me intentionally. It's just that he isn't a real person at all; he's just a few faculties of a man highly developed; the rest simply isn't there. — Evelyn Waugh

Up to a point, Lord Copper. — 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

His constant, despairing prayer was to be let alone. By the blue waters and rustling palms of his own mind he was happy and harmless as a Polynesian; only when the big ship dropped anchor beyond the coral reef, and the cutter beached in the lagoon, and, up the slope that had never known the print of a boot, there trod the grim invasion of trader, administrator, missionary, and tourist - only then was it time to disinter the archaic weapons of the tribe and sound the drums in the hills; or, more easily, to turn from the sunlit door and lie alone in the darkness, where the impotent, painted deities paraded the walls in vain, and cough his heart out among the rum bottles. And — Evelyn Waugh

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

I had been there before; I knew all about it. — Evelyn Waugh

The charm of your writing," Evelyn Waugh once wrote to Mitford, "depends on your refusal to recognize a distinction between girlish chatter and literary language. — Nancy Mitford

Old boy," said Grimes, "you're in love."
"Nonsense!"
"Smitten?" said Grimes.
"No, no."
"The tender passion?"
"No."
"Cupid's jolly little darts?"
"No."
"Spring fancies, love's young dream?"
"Nonsense!"
"Not even a quickening of the pulse?"
"No."
"A sweet despair?"
"Certainly not."
"A trembling hope?"
"No."
"A frisson? a Je ne sais quoi?"
"Nothing of the sort."
"Liar!" said Grimes. — Evelyn Waugh

It is typical of Oxford, I said, to start the new year in autumn. — Evelyn Waugh

At the door fo the dining-room he left us. 'Good night, Mr Jorkins,' he said. 'I hope you will pay us another visit when you next "cross the herring pond".' 'I say, what did your governor mean by that? He seemed almost to think I was American.' 'He's rather odd at times. — Evelyn Waugh

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

What an immature, self-destructive, antiquated mischief is man! How obscure and gross his prancing and chattering on his little stage of evolution! How loathsome and beyond words boring all the thoughts and self-approval of his biological by-product! this half-formed, ill-conditioned body! this erratic, maladjusted mechanism of his soul: on one side the harmonious instincts and balanced responses of the animal, on the other the inflexible purpose of the engine, and between them man, equally alien from the being of Nature and the doing of the machine, the vile becoming! — Evelyn Waugh

Of course those that have charm don't really need brains. — Evelyn Waugh

Oh, I shouldn't try to teach them anything, not just yet, anyway. Just keep them quiet. — Evelyn Waugh

The Catholic Church with its foreshortened American history and tangled puritanical roots was as inviolate to my mother and father as it was to the last-ditch aristocrats of Evelyn Waugh. — Maureen Howard

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

He took a large tablet of beet sugar (an equivalent quantity of ordinary lump sugar does equally well) and soaked it in Angostura Bitters and then rolled it in Cayenne pepper. This he put into a large glass which he filled up with champagne. The excellences of this drink defy description. — Evelyn Waugh

Even on that convivial evening I could feel my host emanating little magnetic waves of social uneasiness, creating, rather, a pool of general embarrassment about himself in which he floated with log-like calm. — Evelyn Waugh

But I had no mind for these smooth things; instead, fear worked like yeast in my thoughts, and the fermentation brought to the surface, in great gobs of scum, the images of disaster; a loaded gun held carelessly at a stile, a horse rearing and rolling over, a shaded pool with a submerged stake, an elm bough falling suddenly on a still morning, a car at a blind corner; all the catalogue of threats to civilized life rose and haunted me; I even pictured a homicidal maniac mouthing in the shadows, swinging a length of lead pipe. — 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 left with it has lost. — Evelyn Waugh

Thus strategists hesitate over the map, the few pins and lines of coloured chalk, contemplating a change in the pins and lines, a matter of inches, which outside the room, out of sight of the studious officers, may engulf the past, present and future in ruin or life. She was a symbol to herself then, lacking the life of both child and woman; victory and defeat were changes of pin and line; she knew nothing of war. — Evelyn Waugh

I rejoiced in the Burgundy. It seemed a reminder that the world was an older and better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his. By chance I met this same wine again, lunching with my wine merchant in St James's Street in the first Autumn of the war; it had softened and faded in the intervening years, but it still spoke in the pure, authentic accent of its prime, the same words of hope. — 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

"What war?" said the Prime Minister sharply. "No one has said anything to me about a war. I really think I should have been told. I'll be damned," he said defiantly, "if they shall have a war without consulting me. What's a cabinet for, if there's not more mutual confidence than that? What do they want a war for anyway?" — Evelyn Waugh

I'm one of the blind alleys off the main road of procreation. — Evelyn Waugh

I knew what she meant, and in that moment felt as though I had shaken off some of the dust and grit of ten dry years; then and always, however she spoke to me, in half sentences, single words, stock phrases of contemporary jargon, in scarcely perceptible movements of eyes or lips or hands, however inexpressible her thought, however quick and far it had glanced from the matter in hand, however deep it had plunged, as it often did, straight from the surface to the depths, I knew; even that day when I still stood on the extreme verge of love, I knew what she meant. — 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

I have been in the scholastic profession long enough to know that nobody enters it unless he has some very good reason that he is anxious to conceal. — Evelyn Waugh

My dear, I could hardly keep still in my chair. I wanted to dash out of the house and leap in a taxi and say, "Take me to Charles's unhealthy pictures." Well, I went, but the gallery after luncheon was so full of absurd women in the sort of hats they should be made to eat, that I rested a little
I rested here with Cyril and Tom and these saucy boys. Then I came back at the unfashionable time of five o'clock, all agog, my dear; and what did I find? I found, my dear, a very naughty and very successful practical joke. It reminded me of dear Sebastian when he liked so much to dress up in false whiskers. It was charm again, my dear, simple, creamy English charm, playing tigers. — Evelyn Waugh

That's the public-school system all over. They may kick you out, but they never let you down. — Evelyn Waugh

Frankly," said the Doctor, "I am at a loss to understand my own emotions. I can think of no entertainment that fills me with greater detestation than a display of competitive athletics, none - except possibly folk dancing. — Evelyn Waugh

Early in 1955 Flannery completed work on her second book, a collection of these stories which she entitled A Good Man Is Hard to Find. In January we sent it to press, having set publication for June. I remember our amusement at Evelyn Waugh's reaction to the advance proofs we sent him: If these stories are in fact the work of a young lady, they are indeed remarkable. — Flannery O'Connor

What is adolescence without trash? — Evelyn Waugh

There were thermal springs, and at the end of the preceding century the town had been laid out modestly as a spa. Hot water still ran in the bath house. Two old gardeners still kept some order in the ornamental grounds. The graded paths, each with a "view-point," the ruins of a seat and of a kiosk, where once invalids had taken their — 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

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

When people hate with all that energy, it is something in themselves they are hating. Alex is hating all the illusions of boyhood - innocence, God, hope. Poor Lady Marchmain has to bear all that. He loved me for a time, quite a short time, as a man loves his own strength; it is simpler for a woman; she has not all these ways of loving. Now Alex is very fond of me and I protect him from his own innocence. — Evelyn Waugh

Harcourt sent my book to Evelyn Waugh and his comment was: "If this is really the unaided work of a young lady, it is a remarkable product." My mother was vastly insulted. She put the emphasis on if and lady. Does he suppose you're not a lady? she says. — Flannery O'Connor

Faster ... Faster ... it'll stop all right when the time comes ... — Evelyn Waugh

When the waterholes were dry, people sought to drink at the mirage. — Evelyn Waugh

Despite their promises at the last Election, the politicians had not yet changed the climate. — Evelyn Waugh

You seem to find everything banal." "it's a new word whose correct use i have only lately learnt,' said josephine with dignity. 'i find it applies to nearly everything. — 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

Oh, why did nobody warn me?" cried Grimes in agony. "I should have been told. They should have told me in so many words. They should have warned me about Flossie, not about the fires of hell. I've risked them, and I don't mind risking them again, but they should have told me about marriage. They should have told me that at the end of that gay journey and flower-strewn path were the hideous lights of home and the voices of children. — Evelyn Waugh

Beerbohm was a genius of the purest kind. He stands at the summit of his art. — Evelyn Waugh

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

Medical science has oppressed us with a new huge burden of longevity. It is in that last undesired decade, when passion is cold, appetites feeble, curiosity dulled and experience has begotten cynicism, that accidia lies in wait as the final temptation to destruction. — Evelyn Waugh

I have no technical psychological interest; it is drama, speech,and events that interest me. — 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

That is not the last word; it is not even an apt word; it is a dead word from ten years back. — Evelyn Waugh

I have lived carefully, sheltered myself from the cold winds, eaten moderately of what was in season, drunk fine claret, slept in my own sheets; I shall live long. — Evelyn Waugh

Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh ... he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste. — A.S. Byatt

No one will write books once they reach heaven, but there is an excellent library, containing all the books written up to date, including all the lost books and the ones that the authors burned when they came back from the last publisher. — Evelyn Waugh

There is proverbially a mystery among most men of new wealth, how they made their first ten thousand; it is the qualities they showed then, before they became bullies, when every man was someone to be placated, when only hope sustained them and they could count on nothing from the world but what could be charmed from it, that make them, if they survive their triumph, successful with women. — Evelyn Waugh

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

Beware of writing to me. I always answer ... My father spent the last 20 years of his life writing letters. If someone thanked him for a wedding present, he thanked them for thanking him and there was no end to the exchange but death. — Evelyn Waugh

It (modernization) is just another jungle closing in. — Evelyn Waugh

Your colleague, Captain Grimes, has been convicted before me on evidence that leaves no possibility of his innocence - of a crime (I might almost call it a course of action) which I can neither understand nor excuse. I dare say I need not particularise. — Evelyn Waugh

The understatement, the self-ridicule, the delight in the foreignness of foreigners, the complete denial of any attempt to enlist the sympathies of his readers in the hardships he has capriciously invited. — Evelyn Waugh

I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence. — Evelyn Waugh

[Evelyn Waugh] made drunkenness cute and chic, and then took to religion, simply to have the most expensive carpet of all to be sick on. — Rebecca West

When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning. — 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

I [had] added another small piece to the pages of the atlas that were real to me. — Evelyn Waugh

O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin, — Evelyn Waugh

You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being. — Evelyn Waugh

I've just been to Greece to see the buildings there,' said Professor Silenus. 'Did you like them?' 'They are unspeakably ugly. But there were some nice goats. — Evelyn Waugh

Port is not for the very young, the vain and the active. It is the comfort of age and the companion of the scholar and the philosopher — Evelyn Waugh

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

I can't bare you when you're not amusing. — Evelyn Waugh

Not for her the cruel, delicate luxury of choice, the indolent, cat-and-mouse pastimes of the hearth-rug. No Penelope she; she must hunt in the forest. — Evelyn Waugh

He was entrancing, with that epicene beauty which in extreme youth sings aloud for love and withers at the first cold wind. — Evelyn Waugh

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

There could be no eldest son for her, and younger sons were indelicate things, necessary, but not to be much spoken of. Younger sons had none of the privileges of obscurity; it was their plain duty to remain hidden until some disaster perchance promoted them to their brother's places, and, since this was their function, it was desirable that they should keep themselves wholly suitable for succession. — Evelyn Waugh

What is youth except a man or woman before it is ready or fit to be seen? — Evelyn Waugh

The next four weeks of solitary confinement were among the happiest of Paul's life ... It was so exhilarating, he found, never to have to make any decision on any subject, to be wholly relieved from the smallest consideration of time, meas, or clothes, to have no anxiety ever about what kind of impression he was making; in fact, to be free. — Evelyn Waugh

We possess nothing certainly except the past — Evelyn Waugh

His courtesy was somewhat extravagant. He would write and thank people who wrote to thank him for wedding presents and when he encountered anyone as punctilious as himself the correspondence ended only with death. — Evelyn Waugh

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

The avalanche was down, the hillside swept bare behind it; the last echoes died on the white slopes; the new mount glittered and lay still in the silent valley. — Evelyn Waugh

Miss Runcible wore trousers and Miles touched up his eye-lashes in the dining-room of the hotel where they stopped for luncheon. So they were asked to leave. — 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

My go-to author for knowing it all is Evelyn Waugh. 'A Handful of Dust' is as perfect as a book can get. — Laurie Graham

Mr. Schultz, you're jealous of whispering Glades."
"And why wouldn't I be seeing all that dough going on relations they've hated all their lives, while the pets who've loved them and stood by them , never asked no questions, never complained, rich or poor, sickness or health, get buried anyhow like animals? — Evelyn Waugh

Don't give your opinions about Art and the Purpose of Life. They are of little interest and, anyway, you can't express them. Don't analyze yourself. Give the relevant facts and let your readers make their own judgments. Stick to your story. It is not the most important subject in history but it is one about which you are uniquely qualified to speak. — 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

It's awful to think that I shall probably never, as long as I live, see you dancing like that again all by yourself. — Evelyn Waugh

Comparisons are odious. — Evelyn Waugh

She was daily surprised by the things he knew and the things he did not know; both, at the time, added to his attraction. — Evelyn Waugh

We class schools into four grades: leading school, first-rate school, good school and school. — 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