Evelyn Waugh Quotes

Well, you see, she was saintly but she wasn't a saint. No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can't really hate God either. When they want to hate him and his saints they have to find something like themselves and pretend it's God and hate that. I suppose you think that's all bosh.

I know I am awful. But how much more awful I should be without the Faith.

If only people realized Corbusier is pure nineteenth century, Manchester school utilitarian, and that's why they like him.

1910–11 was a time of the wildest uncertainty and political ferment. True, those good old politicians who still figure in the cartoons were already with us, but in what different guise! Our die-hard Mr Winston Churchill was the radical Home Secretary; Mr Ramsay MacDonald was preaching class war with something very near to verbal coherence; Mr Lloyd George, whom frequent photographs have endeared to us as a benevolent landed proprietor, was inveighing against the privileges of the gentry in terms which might have been translated direct from Danton or Robespierre.

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.

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.

Cordelia: I hope I've got a vocation.

Charles: I don't know what that means.

Cordelia: It means you can be a nun. If you haven't a vocation it's no good however much you want to be; and if you have a vocation, you can't get away from it, however much you hate it.

One of the problems of the vacation is money, father.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t worry about a thing like that at your age.”

“You see, I’ve run rather short.”

“Yes?” said my father without any sound of interest.

“In fact I don’t quite know how I’m going to get through the next two months.”

“Well, I’m the worst person to come to for advice. I’ve never been ‘short’ as you so painfully call it. And yet what else could you say? Hard up? Penurious? Distressed? Embarrassed? Stony-broke?” (Snuffle.) “On the rocks? In Queer Street? Let us say you are in Queer Street and leave it at that. Your grandfather once said to me, ‘Live within your means, but if you do get into difficulties, come to me. Don’t go to the Jews.

Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.

Downstairs Peter Beste-Chetwynde mixed himself another brandy and soda and turned a page in Havelock Ellis, which, next to The Wind in the Willows, was his favourite book.

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

His heart; some long word at the heart. He is dying of a long word.

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

Up to a point, Lord Copper.

As my intimacy with his family grew, I became part of the world which he sought to escape; I became one of the bonds which held him.