Evelyn Waugh Quotes

it's a great thing in life to have a place you can't be moved from - too few of them

You could appreciate the beauty of the world by trying to paint it.

"She told me later that she had made a kind of note of me in her mind, as, scanning the shelf for a particular book, one will sometimes have one's attention caught by another, take it down, glance at the title page and saying "I must read that, too, when I've the time," replace it and continue the search."

[P]erhaps 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.

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.

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.

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

Here my last love had died.

I had been there before; I knew all about it.

O God, make me good, but not yet.

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.

"A hundred days wasted out of two years and a bit ... a day when you were not in my heart; not a day's coldness mistrust or disappointment."

"Never that."

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.

Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist.

Chokey thinks religion is just divine.