Evelyn Waugh Quotes

We possess nothing certainly except the past ~ Evelyn Waugh

Look, Father, I don't think you're being straight with me. I want to join your Church and I'm going to join your Church, but you're holding too much back. I've had a long talk with a Catholic-a very pious, well-educated one, and I've learned a thing or two. For instance, that you have to sleep with your feet pointing East because that's the direction of heaven, and if you die in the night you can walk there. Now I'll sleep with my feet pointing any way that suits Julia, but d'you expect a grown man to believe about walking to heaven? And what about the Pope who made one of his horses a Cardinal? And what about the box you keep in the church porch, and if you put in a pound note with someone's name on it, they get sent to hell. I don't say there mayn't be a good reason for all this, but you ought to tell me about it and not let me find out for myself. ~ Evelyn Waugh

My go-to author for knowing it all is Evelyn Waugh. 'A Handful of Dust' is as perfect as a book can get. ~ Laurie Graham

Two wives despaired of him,' he said. 'When he got engaged to Sylvia, she made it a condition that he should take the cure at Zurich. And it worked. He came back in three months a different man. And he hasn't touched a drop since, even though Sylvia walked out on him.'
'Why did she do that?'
Well, poor Charlie got rather a bore when he stopped drinking. But that's not really the point of the story. ~ Evelyn Waugh

Ah well, to the journalist every country is rich. ~ Evelyn Waugh

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

We think it a very promising little war. A microcosm, as you might say, of world drama. ~ Evelyn Waugh

Not for her the cruel, delicate luxury of choice, the indolent, cat-and-mouse pastimes of the hearth-rug. No Penelope she; she must hunt in the forest. ~ Evelyn Waugh

A conservative is not merely an obstructionist who wishes to resist the introduction of novelties; nor is he, as was assumed by most 19th-century parliamentarians, a brake to frivolous experiment. He has positive work to do ... Civilization has no force of its own beyond what is given from within. It is under constant assault and it takes most of the energies of civilized man to keep going at all ... If [it] falls we shall see not merely the dissolution of a few joint-stock corporations, but of the spiritual and material achievements of our history. ~ Evelyn Waugh

Beware of writing to me. I always answer ... My father spent the last 20 years of his life writing letters. If someone thanked him for a wedding present, he thanked them for thanking him and there was no end to the exchange but death. ~ Evelyn Waugh

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

Comparisons are odious. ~ Evelyn Waugh

Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son. ~ Evelyn Waugh

If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be ~ Evelyn Waugh

Properly understood, style is not a seductive decoration added to a functional structure; it is of the essence of a work of art. The necessary elements of style are lucidity, elegance, and individuality; these three qualities combine to form a preservative which ensures the nearest approximation to permanence in the fugitive art of letters. ~ Evelyn Waugh

Despite their promises at the last Election, the politicians had not yet changed the climate. ~ Evelyn Waugh

You seem to find everything banal." "it's a new word whose correct use i have only lately learnt,' said josephine with dignity. 'i find it applies to nearly everything. ~ Evelyn Waugh

What is it about being on a boat that makes everyone behave like a film star?
Julia Flyte ~ Evelyn Waugh

Most writers in the course of their careers become thick-skinned and learn to accept vituperation, which in any other profession would be unimaginably offensive, as a healthy counterpoise to unintelligent praise. ~ Evelyn Waugh

Brenda descended the great staircase step by step through alternations of dusk and rainbow. ~ Evelyn Waugh

Soon someone would say the fatal words, Well, I think it's time for me to go to bed. ~ Evelyn Waugh

Success in this world depends on knowing exactly how little effort each job is worth ... distribution of energy ... ~ Evelyn Waugh

It is a curious thing ... that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste. ~ Evelyn Waugh

At night his most frequent recurring dream was of doing The Times crossword puzzle; his most disagreeable that he was reading a tedious book aloud to his family. ~ Evelyn Waugh

I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed. ~ Evelyn Waugh

Rex has never been unkind to me intentionally. It's just that he isn't a real person at all; he's just a few faculties of a man highly developed; the rest simply isn't there. ~ Evelyn Waugh

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. ~ Evelyn Waugh

The anguished suspense of watching the lips you hunger for, framing the words, the death sentence, of sheer triteness! ~ Evelyn Waugh

You know," he added reflectively, "we've got a much easier job now than we should have had fifty years ago. If we'd had to modernise a country then it would have meant constitutional monarchy, bicameral legislature, proportional representation, women's suffrage, independent judicature, freedom of the press, referendums ... "
"What is all that?" asked the Emperor.
"Just a few ideas that have ceased to be modern. ~ Evelyn Waugh

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. ~ Evelyn Waugh

Something quite remote from anything the builders intended has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time: a small red flame
a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design, relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones. ~ Evelyn Waugh

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

He lay back for a little in his bed thinking about the smells of food ... of the intoxicating breath of bakeries and dullness of buns ... He planned dinners, of enchanting aromatic foods ... endless dinners, in which one could alternate flavor with flavor from sunset to dawn without satiety, while one breathed great draughts of the bouquet of brandy. ~ Evelyn Waugh

The Pension Dressler stood in a side street and had, at first glance, the air rather of a farm than of a hotel. Frau Dressler's pig, tethered by one hind trotter to the jamb of the front door, roamed the yard and disputed the kitchen scraps with the poultry. He was a prodigious beast. Frau Dressler's guests prodded him appreciatively on the way to the dining-room, speculating on how soon he would be ripe for killing. The milch-goat was allowed a narrower radius; those who kept strictly to the causeway were safe, but she never reconciled herself to this limitation and, day in, day out, essayed a series of meteoric onslaughts on the passers-by, ending, at the end of her rope, with a jerk which would have been death to an animal of any other species. One day the rope would break; she knew it, and so did Frau Dressler's guests. ~ Evelyn Waugh

Even on that convivial evening I could feel my host emanating little magnetic waves of social uneasiness, creating, rather, a pool of general embarrassment about himself in which he floated with log-like calm. ~ Evelyn Waugh

What is a "canty day", Dennis?'
'I've never troubled to ask. Something like hogmanay, I expect.'
'What is that?'
'People being sick on the pavement in Glasgow.'
'Oh. ~ Evelyn Waugh

A whole Gothic world had come to grief ... there was now no armour glittering through the forest glades, no embroidered feet on the green sward; the cream and dappled unicorns had fled ... ~ Evelyn Waugh

In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice. ~ Evelyn Waugh

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

We class schools into four grades: leading school, first-rate school, good school and school. ~ Evelyn Waugh

From the earliest times the Welsh have been looked upon as an unclean people. It is thus that they have preserved their racial integrity. Their sons and daughters rarely mate with humankind except their own blood relations. ~ Evelyn Waugh

She was daily surprised by the things he knew and the things he did not know; both, at the time, added to his attraction. ~ Evelyn Waugh

They are all negros. And the Fascists won't be called black because of their racial pride, so they are called White after the White Russians. And the Bolsheviks want to be called Black because of their racial pride. So when you say black you mean red, and when you mean red you say white and when the party who call themselves blacks say traitors they mean what we call blacks, but what we mean when we say traitors I really couldn't tell you. But from your point of view it will be quite simple. Lord Copper only wants patriot victories and both sides call themselves patriots, and of course both sides will claim all the victories. But, of course, it's really a war between Russia and Germany and Italy and Japan who are all against one another on the patriotic side. I hope I make myself plain? ~ Evelyn Waugh

The Second World War wasn't bad provided you were with nice people. ~ Evelyn Waugh

When people hate with all that energy, it is something in themselves they are hating. Alex is hating all the illusions of boyhood - innocence, God, hope. Poor Lady Marchmain has to bear all that. He loved me for a time, quite a short time, as a man loves his own strength; it is simpler for a woman; she has not all these ways of loving. Now Alex is very fond of me and I protect him from his own innocence. ~ Evelyn Waugh

Harcourt sent my book to Evelyn Waugh and his comment was: "If this is really the unaided work of a young lady, it is a remarkable product." My mother was vastly insulted. She put the emphasis on if and lady. Does he suppose you're not a lady? she says. ~ Flannery O'Connor

O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin, ~ Evelyn Waugh

I knew it all, the whole drab compass of marital disillusion; we had been through it together, the Army and I, from the first importunate courtship until now, when nothing remained to us except the chill bonds of law and duty and custom. I had played every scene in the domestic tragedy, had found the early tiffs become more frequent, the tears less affecting, the reconciliations less sweet, till they engendered a mood of aloofness and cool criticism, and the growing conviction that it was not myself but the loved one who was at fault. I caught the false notes in her voice and learned to listen for them apprehensively; I recognized the blank, resentful stare of incomprehension in her eyes, and the selfish, hard set of the corners of her mouth. I learned her, as one must learn a woman one has kept house with, day in, day out, for three and a half years; I learned her slatternly ways, the routine and mechanism of her charm, her jealousy and self-seeking, and her nervous trick with the fingers when she was lying. She was stripped of all enchantment now and I knew her for an uncongenial stranger to whom I had bound myself indissolubly in a moment of folly. ~ Evelyn Waugh

We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them. ~ Evelyn Waugh

Thus strategists hesitate over the map, the few pins and lines of coloured chalk, contemplating a change in the pins and lines, a matter of inches, which outside the room, out of sight of the studious officers, may engulf the past, present and future in ruin or life. She was a symbol to herself then, lacking the life of both child and woman; victory and defeat were changes of pin and line; she knew nothing of war. ~ Evelyn Waugh

There was one thing unforgivable, like things in the schoolroom so bad that only Mommy could deal with, to set up a rival good to God's. ~ Evelyn Waugh

The charm of your writing," Evelyn Waugh once wrote to Mitford, "depends on your refusal to recognize a distinction between girlish chatter and literary language. ~ Nancy Mitford

Sebastian's life was governed by a code of such imperatives. 'I must have pillar-box red pyjamas,' 'I have to stay in bed until the sun works round the windows,' 'I've absolutely got to drink champagne tonight. ~ Evelyn Waugh

To see Stephen Spender fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee. ~ Evelyn Waugh

My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless. ~ Evelyn Waugh

Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh ... he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste. ~ A.S. Byatt

The Grace of God is in courtesy'; ~ Evelyn Waugh

He seems to be in a very bad temper." "Not really. He's always like that to waiters. You see he's a communist. Most of the staff of The Twopence are - they're University men, you see. Pappenhacker says that every time you are polite to a proletarian you are helping to bolster up the capitalist system. He's very clever of course, but he gets rather unpopular. ~ Evelyn Waugh

I never see you now,' she said. 'I never seem to see anyone I like. I don't know why.'
But she spoke as though it were a matter of weeks rather than of years; as though, too, before our parting we had been firm friends. It was dead contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the tangle of wire. ~ Evelyn Waugh

There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair. ~ Evelyn Waugh

Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you. ~ Evelyn Waugh

Then they began saying, "Get hold of him. Put him in Mercury." Now as you know I have two sculptures by Brancusi and several pretty things and I did not want them to start getting rough, so I said, pacifically, "Dear sweet clodhoppers, if you knew anything of sexual psychology you would know that nothing could give me keener pleasure than to be manhandled by you meaty boys. It would be an ecstasy of the very naughtiest kind. So if any of you wishes to be my partner in joy come and seize me. If, on the other hand, you simply wish to satisfy some obscure and less easily classified libido and see me bathe, come with me quietly, dear louts, to the fountain. ~ Evelyn Waugh

I don't believe that people would ever fall in love or want to be married if they hadn't been told about it. It's like abroad: no one would want to go there if they hadn't been told it existed. ~ Evelyn Waugh

We can trace almost all the disasters of English history to the influence of Wales. ~ Evelyn Waugh

This was my conversion to the baroque. Here under that high and insolent dome, under those tricky ceilings; here, as I passed through those arches and broken pediments to the pillared shade beyond and sat, hour by hour, before the fountain, probing its shadows, tracing its lingering echoes, rejoicing in all its clustered feats of daring and invention, I felt a whole new system of nerves alive within me, as though the water that spurted and bubbled among its stones was indeed a life-giving spring. ~ Evelyn Waugh

A wonderfully congenial group who live by a unique set of social standards. According to their rules, any sin is acceptable provided it is carried off in good taste. ~ Evelyn Waugh

Beavers bred in captivity, inhabiting a concrete pool, will, if given the timber, fatuously go through all the motions of damming an ancestral stream. ~ Evelyn Waugh

When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning. ~ Evelyn Waugh

There is a species of person called a 'Modern Churchman' who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief. ~ Evelyn Waugh

You can't ever tell what's going to hurt people. ~ Evelyn Waugh

Here I am,' I thought, 'back from the jungle, back from the ruins. Here, where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity. ~ Evelyn Waugh

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. ~ Evelyn Waugh

At the door fo the dining-room he left us. 'Good night, Mr Jorkins,' he said. 'I hope you will pay us another visit when you next "cross the herring pond".' 'I say, what did your governor mean by that? He seemed almost to think I was American.' 'He's rather odd at times. ~ Evelyn Waugh

Its a rather pleasant change when all your life you've had people looking after you, to have someone to look after yourself. Only of course it has to be someone pretty hopeless to need looking after by me. ~ Evelyn Waugh

There is proverbially a mystery among most men of new wealth, how they made their first ten thousand; it is the qualities they showed then, before they became bullies, when every man was someone to be placated, when only hope sustained them and they could count on nothing from the world but what could be charmed from it, that make them, if they survive their triumph, successful with women. ~ Evelyn Waugh

Never get mixed up in a Welsh wrangle. It doesn't end in blows like an Irish one, but goes on forever. ~ Evelyn Waugh

Aunt Fanny tells me you made great friends with Mr. Mottram. I'm sure he can't be very nice.'
'I don't think he is,' said Julia. 'I don't know that I like nice people ~ Evelyn Waugh

It's not to be expected that an ox and an ass should worship at the crib. Animals are always doing the oddest things in the lives of the saints. It's all part of the poetry, the Alice-In-Wonderland side of religion. ~ Evelyn Waugh

The most futile and disastrous day seems well spent when it is reviewed through the blue, fragrant smoke of a Havana Cigar. ~ Evelyn Waugh

I think there's almost nothing I can't excuse except perhaps worshiping graven images. That seems to be idiotic. ~ Evelyn Waugh

I am suing Lord Beaverbrook for libel and hope for some lovely tax-free money in damages. He has very conveniently told some lies about me. ~ Evelyn Waugh

I am sorry to disturb you,' said James politely, 'but these people wished to shoot us. ~ Evelyn Waugh

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. ~ Evelyn Waugh

[...] but they and I had fallen apart, as one could in England and only there, into separate worlds, little spinning planets of personal relationship; there is probably a perfect metaphor for the process to be found in physics, from the way in which, I dimly apprehend, particles of energy group and regroup themselves in separate magnetic systems; a metaphor ready to hand for the man who can speak of these things with assurance; not for me, who can only say that England abounded in these small companies of intimate friends, so that, as in this case of Julia and myself, we could live in the same street in London, see at times, a few miles distant, the rural horizon, could have a liking one for the other, a mild curiosity about the other's fortunes, a regret, even, that we should be separated, and the knowledge that either of us had only to pick up the telephone and speak by the other's pillow, enjoy the intimacies of the levee, coming in, as it were, with the morning orange juice and the sun, yet be restrained from doing so by the centripetal force of our own worlds, and the cold, interstellar space between them. ~ Evelyn Waugh

What is youth except a man or woman before it is ready or fit to be seen? ~ Evelyn Waugh

Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom. ~ Evelyn Waugh

I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence. ~ Evelyn Waugh

He lit his cigar and sat back at peace with the world; I, too, was at peace in another world than his. We both were happy. He talked of Julia and I heard his voice, unintelligible at a great distance, like a dog's barking miles away on a still night. ~ Evelyn Waugh

I rejoiced in the Burgundy. It seemed a reminder that the world was an older and better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his. By chance I met this same wine again, lunching with my wine merchant in St James's Street in the first Autumn of the war; it had softened and faded in the intervening years, but it still spoke in the pure, authentic accent of its prime, the same words of hope. ~ Evelyn Waugh

I remember no syllable of them now, but the other, more ancient lore which I acquired that term will be with me in one shape or another to my last hour. "I like this bad set and I like getting drunk at luncheon"; that was enough then. Is more needed now? ~ Evelyn Waugh

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

There was a change in both of us. We had lost a sense of discovery which had infused the anarchy of our first year. ~ Evelyn Waugh

I read the newspapers with lively interest. It is seldom that they are absolutely, point-blank wrong. That is the popular belief, but those who are in the know can usually discern an embryo of truth, a little grit of fact, like the core of a pearl, round which have been deposited the delicate layers of ornament. ~ Evelyn Waugh

You're to come away at once, out of danger. I've got a motor-car and a basket of strawberries and a bottle of Château Peyraguey - which isn't a wine you've ever tasted, so don't pretend. It's heaven with strawberries. ~ Evelyn Waugh

six black Cordelias ~ Evelyn Waugh

Impotence and sodomy are socially O.K. but birth control is flagrantly middle-class. ~ Evelyn Waugh

I knew Sebastian by sight long before I met him. That was unavoidable for, from his first week, he was the most conspicuous man of his year by reason of his beauty, which was arresting, and his eccentricities of behaviour, which seemed to know no bounds ... I was struck less by his looks than by the fact that he was carrying a large teddy-bear. ~ Evelyn Waugh

I was extremely shy of approaching my hero but he, as I found out, was sorely in need of company. By then almost completely blind, he was claustrated and even a little confused and this may help explain the rather shocking attitude that he took to the blunt trauma that was being inflicted in the streets and squares around him. 'This was my country and it might be yet,' he intoned to me when the topic first came up, as it had to: 'But something came between it and the sun.' This couplet he claimed (I have never been able to locate it) was from Edmund Blunden, whose gnarled hand I had been so excited to shake all those years ago, but it was not the Videla junta that Borges meant by the allusion. It was the pre-existing rule of Juan Perón, which he felt had depraved and corrupted Argentine society. I didn't disagree with this at all - and Perón had victimized Borges's mother and sister as well as having Borges himself fired from his job at the National Library - but it was nonetheless sad to hear the old man saying that he heartily preferred the new uniformed regime, as being one of 'gentlemen' as opposed to 'pimps.' This was a touch like listening to Evelyn Waugh at his most liverish and bufferish. (It was also partly redeemed by a piece of learned philology or etymology concerning the Buenos Aires dockside slang for pimp: canfinflero. 'A canfinfla, you see,' said Borges with perfect composure, 'is a pussy or more exactly a cunt. So a canfinflero is a trafficker in cunt: in Ang ~ Christopher Hitchens

Here my last love had died. ~ Evelyn Waugh

I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live but I am told that this is a common experience. ~ Evelyn Waugh