Evelyn Waugh Quotes

• If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.
• All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day.
• 'We, Seth, Emperor of Azania, Chief of 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. . .' Seth paused in his dictation and gazed out across the harbour where in the fresh breeze of early morning the last dhow was setting sail for the open sea. 'Rats,' he said; 'stinking curs. They are all running away.'
• 'Was anyone hurt?' 'No one I am thankful to say,' said Mrs. Beaver, 'except two housemaids who lost their heads and jumped through a glass roof into the paved court.'
• The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.
• So the two of them went to London by the early morning train. 'Let's surprise her,' said Nigel, but Cedric telephoned first, wryly remembering the story of the pedantic adulterer - 'My dear, it is I who am surprised; you are astounded.'
• No.3 Commando was very anxious to be chums with Lord Glasgow, so they offered to blow up an old tree stump for him and he was very grateful and said don't spoil the plantation of young trees near it because that is the apple of my eye and they said no of course not we can blow a tree down so it falls on a sixpence and Lord Glasgow said goodness you are clever and he asked them all to luncheon for the great explosion. So Col. Durnford-Slater DSO said to his subaltern, have you put enough explosive in the tree?. Yes, sir, 75lbs. Is that enough? Yes sir I worked it out by mathematics it is exactly right. Well better put a bit more. Very good sir. And when Col. D Slater DSO had had his port he sent for the subaltern and said subaltern better put a bit more explosive in that tree. I don't want to disappoint Lord Glasgow. Very good sir. Then they all went out to see the explosion and Col. DS DSO said you will see that tree fall flat at just the angle where it will hurt no young trees and Lord Glasgow said goodness you are clever. So soon they lit the fuse and waited for the explosion and presently the tree, instead of falling quietly sideways, rose 50 feet into the air taking with it ? acre of soil and the whole young plantation. And the subaltern said Sir, I made a mistake, it should have been 7? not 75. Lord Glasgow was so upset he walked in dead silence back to his castle and when they came to the turn of the drive in sight of his castle what should they find but that every pane of glass in the building was broken. So Lord Glasgow gave a little cry and ran to hide his emotions in the lavatory and there when he pulled the plug the entire ceiling, loosened by the explosion, fell on his head. This is quite true.
• 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.
• All day the head had been barely supportable but at evening a breeze arose in the West, blowing from the heart of the setting sun and from the ocean, which lay unseen, unheard behind the scrubby foothills. It shook the rusty fringes of palm-leaf and swelled the dry sounds of summer, the frog-voices, the grating cicadas, and the ever present pulse of music from the neighbouring native huts.
• In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice. No one would think of making an after-dinner speech without the help of poetry. It used to be the classics, now it's lyric verse.
• 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.
• Don't hold your parents up to contempt. After all, you are their son, and it is just possible that you may take after them.
• It may happen in the next hundred years that the English novelists of the present day will come to be valued as we now value the artists and craftsmen of the late eighteenth century.
• He had no wish to obliterate anything he had written, but he would dearly have liked to revise it, envying painters, who are allowed to return to the same theme time and time again, clarifying and enriching until they have done all they can with it. A novelist is condemned to provide a succession of novelties, new names for characters, new incidents for his plots, new scenery; but; Mr Pinfold maintained, most men harbour the germs of one or two books only; all else is professional trickery of which the most daemonic of the masters - Dickens and Balzac even - were flagrantly guilty.
• A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.' Diary entry (March 1964), after hearing that doctors had removed a benign tumor from Randolph Churchill.
• Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.
• I put the words down and push them a bit.
• Aesthetic value is often the by-product of the artist striving to do something else.
• Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.
• You never find an Englishman among the underdogs - except in England, of course.
• Please bear in mind throughout that IT IS MEANT TO BE FUNNY.
• Mr. Sniggs, the Junior Dean, and Mr. Postlethwaite, the Domestic Bursar, sat alone in Mr. Sniggs's room overlooking the garden quad at Scone College.
• I'm one of the blind alleys off the main road of procreation.
• 'We class schools, you see, into four grades: Leading School, First-rate School, Good School, and School. Frankly,' said Mr Levy, 'School is pretty bad...'
• There will be a prize of half a crown for the longest essay, irrespective of any possible merit.
• There is a species of person called a 'Modern Churchman' who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief
• That's the public-school system all over. They may kick you out, but they never let you down.
• Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.
• I came to the conclusion many years ago that almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.
• I expect you'll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That's what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour.
• 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.
• Anyone 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 who find prison so soul-destroying.
• While still a young man, John Courteney Boot had, as his publisher proclaimed, 'achieved an assured and enviable position in contemporary letters.'
• As there was no form of government common to the peoples thus segregated, nor tie of language, history, habit, or belief, they were called a Republic.
• Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.
• 'The Beast stands for strong mutually antagonistic governments everywhere,' he said. 'Self-sufficiency at home, self-assertion abroad.'
• Other nations use 'force'; we Britons alone use 'Might'.
• News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead.
• He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.
• 'I will not stand for being called a woman in my own house,'
• 'Up to a point, Lord Copper.'
• 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.
• 'I have been here before,' I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.
• But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiousity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchaned garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.
• '...Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and the plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them. But when dear Sebastian speaks it is like a little sphere of soapsud drifting off the end of an old clay pipe, anywhere, full of rainbow light for a secnd and then - phut! vanished, with nothing left at all, nothing.'
• How ungenerously in later life we disclaim the virtuous moods of our youth, living in retrospect long, summer days of unreflecting dissipation. There is no candour in a story of early manhood which leaves out of account the home-sickness for nursery morality, the regrets and resolutions of amendment, the black hours which, like zero on the roulette table, turn up with roughly calculable regularity.'
• 'It is typical of Oxford,' I said, 'to start the new year in autumn.'
• '...I wonder if you remember the story mummy read us the evening Sebastian first got drunk - I mean the bad evening. 'Father Brown' said something like 'I caught him' (the thief) 'with an unseen hook and and invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.''[1]
• My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.
• We possess nothing certainly except the past.
• '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 whcih turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.'
• 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.
• O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin.
• '...But I saw today there was one thing unforgivable - like things in the school-room, so bad they were unpunishable, that only mummy could deal with - the bad thing I was on the point of doing, that I'm not quite bad enough to do; to set up a rival good to God's.'
• Quomondo sedet sola civitas. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
• I put the words down and push them a bit.
• I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners.
• If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be.
• In the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. It used to be the classics, now it's lyric verse.
• It is a curious thing... that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.
• Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.
• 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.
• My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.
• Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now.
• Of children as of procreation- the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable.
• One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.
• Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.
• 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.
• Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases.
• Saints are simply men and women who have fulfilled their natural obligation which is to approach God.
• The human mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with a similar energy.
• The truth is that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up.
• There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.
• We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them.
• What a man enjoys about a woman's clothes are his fantasies of how she would look without them.
• What is youth except a man or a woman before it is ready or fit to be seen?
• When we argue for our limitations, we get to keep them.
• Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker.
• Your action, and your action alone, determines your worth.
• Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.
• 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.
• The lady said, 'It's no good trying to buy a paper here. That Sir William Beveridge is going to abolish want, so all the papers were sold out'. Later that day or the next day I asked him to come to lunch. I was meeting with Evelyn Waugh, an old friend and famous writer. They did not get on at all well. Evelyn Waugh said to him at the end, 'How do you get your main pleasure in life, Sir William?' He paused and said, 'I get mine trying to leave the world a better place than I found it'. Evelyn Waugh said, 'I get mine spreading alarm and despondency' - this was in the height of the war - 'and I get more satisfaction than you do'. So he did not meet with universal acclamation, but nearly everyone admired Beveridge at that time. He was a wonderful man.

evelyn waugh