Quote #68

Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases.

More from Evelyn Waugh

  1. 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 …
  2. Saints are simply men and women who have fulfilled their natural obligation which is to approach God.
  3. Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.
  4. The human mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with a similar energy.
  5. One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.
  6. 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…
  7. Of children as of procreation- the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable.
  8. There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

All Evelyn Waugh quotes