Evelyn Waugh Quotes - Page 3

A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.

To understand all is to forgive all.

Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.

Mr. Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.

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

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

I can't bare you when you're not amusing.

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.

I haven't been to sleep for over a year. That's why I go to bed early. One needs more rest if one doesn't sleep.

News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read.

Port is not for the very young, the vain and the active. It is the comfort of age and the companion of the scholar and the philosopher

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

The tourist debauches the great monuments of antiquity, a comic figure, always inapt in his comments, incongruous in his appearance; ...avarice and deceit attack him at every step; the shops that he patronizes are full of forgeries... But we need feel no scruple or twinge of uncertainty; 'we' are travelers and cosmopolitans; the tourist is the other fellow.

I'm quite deaf now; such a comfort.

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 pretends it's God and hate that.

I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners.

Anyone could write a novel given six weeks, pen paper, and no telephone or wife.

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

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

He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.

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.

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

Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them.

There is an Easter sense in which all things are made new in the risen Christ. A tiny gleam of this is reflected in all true art.