Top 15 Evelyn Waugh Quotes

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

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.

It doesn't matter what people call you unless they call you pigeon pie and eat you up.

After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can't trust a person.

I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.

If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be.

If it could only be like this always – always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper...

O God, make me good, but not yet.

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 which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.

The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what's been taught and what's been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn't know existed.

To understand all is to forgive all.

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.

...for in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.

No one is ever holy without suffering.

Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?