Evelyn Waugh Quotes

...the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.

When we argue for our limitations, we get to keep them.

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

George Orwell wrote in 1942 at the height of his revulsion from what he regarded as the feeble hypocrisy of English socialist journalism. If he were alive today he would no doubt derive much ironic amusement from the changed position in popular esteem of the Boers in this half-century from that of the gallant little people fighting for their homesteads and way of life to that of the villains of apartheid.

When I first came into the Church I was drawn, not by splendid ceremonies but by the spectacle of the priest as a craftsman. He had an important job to do which none but he was qualified for. He and his apprentice stumped up to the altar with their tools and set to work without a glance to those behind them, still less with any intention to make a personal impression on them. "Participate" – the cant word – does not mean to make a row as the Germans suppose. One participates in a work of art when one studies it with reverence and understanding.

When people hate with all that energy, it is something in themselves they are hating.

I go to Rome for Easter (Grand Hotel) to avoid the horrors of the English liturgy.

Now we shall both be alone, and I shall have no way of making you understand.'
'I don't want to make it easier for you,' I said; 'I hope your heart may break; but I do understand.

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.

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

...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.

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

Sometimes,” said Julia, “I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.

"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."

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