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Evelyn Waugh Quotes

Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh was an English writer of novels, biographies, and travel books; he was also a prolific journalist and book reviewer. His most famous works include the early satires Decline and Fall and A Handful of Dust , the novel Brideshead Revisited , and the Second World War trilogy Sword of Honour . He is recognised as one of the great prose stylists of the English language in the 20th century.Waugh was the son of a publisher, educated at Lancing College and then at Hertford College, Oxford. He worked briefly as a schoolmaster before he became a full-time writer. As a young man, he acquired many fashionable and aristocratic friends and developed a taste for country house society. He travelled extensively in the 1930s, often as a special newspaper correspondent; he reported from Abyssinia at the time of the 1935 Italian invasion. He served in the British armed forces throughout the Second World War, first in the Royal Marines and then in the Royal Horse Guards. He was a perceptive writer who used the experiences and the wide range of people whom he encountered in his works of fiction, generally to humorous effect. Waugh's detachment was such that he fictionalised his own mental breakdown which occurred in the early 1950s.

Waugh converted to Catholicism in 1930 after his first marriage failed. His traditionalist stance led him to strongly oppose all attempts to reform the Church, and the changes by the Second Vatican Council greatly disturbed his sensibilities, especially the introduction of the vernacular Mass. That blow to his religious traditionalism, his dislike for the welfare state culture of the postwar world, and the decline of his health all darkened his final years, but he continued to write. He displayed to the world a mask of indifference, but he was capable of great kindness to those whom he considered his friends. After his death in 1966, he acquired a following of new readers through the film and television versions of his works, such as the television serial Brideshead Revisited . Wikipedia  

✵ 28. October 1903 – 10. April 1966   •   Other names Evelyn Arthur John Waugh
Evelyn Waugh photo

Works

Decline and Fall
Decline and Fall
Evelyn Waugh
Brideshead Revisited
Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh
Scoop
Scoop
Evelyn Waugh
Vile Bodies
Vile Bodies
Evelyn Waugh
The Loved One
The Loved One
Evelyn Waugh
A Handful of Dust
A Handful of Dust
Evelyn Waugh
Put Out More Flags
Put Out More Flags
Evelyn Waugh
Black Mischief
Black Mischief
Evelyn Waugh
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold
A Little Learning
A Little Learning
Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh: 123   quotes 8   likes

Famous Evelyn Waugh Quotes

“[Change is] the only evidence of life.”

Evelyn Waugh

Source: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

“Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.”

Evelyn Waugh

Diaries of Evelyn Waugh (1976)

“He had no wish to obliterate anything he had written, but he would dearly have liked to revise it, envying painters, who are allowed to return to the same theme time and time again, clarifying and enriching until they have done all they can with it. A novelist is condemned to provide a succession of novelties, new names for characters, new incidents for his plots, new scenery; but, Mr Pinfold maintained, most men harbour the germs of one or two books only; all else is professional trickery of which the most daemonic of the masters — Dickens and Balzac even — were flagrantly guilty.”

Evelyn Waugh book The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold

Source: The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957), Chapter 1

“But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiousity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.”

Evelyn Waugh book Brideshead Revisited

Part 1, Chapter 1
Brideshead Revisited (1945)

“Mrs. Ape's famous hymn, There ain't no flies on the Lamb of God.”

Evelyn Waugh book Vile Bodies

Source: Vile Bodies (1930), Chapter 1

Evelyn Waugh Quotes about people

“But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into the depths of confusion you didn't know existed.”

Evelyn Waugh

Source: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

“You can't ever tell what's going to hurt people.”

Evelyn Waugh book A Handful of Dust

Source: A Handful of Dust

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

Evelyn Waugh

Part 2, Chapter 3
Brideshead Revisited (1945)
Source: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

“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 book Vile Bodies

Source: Vile Bodies

“As there was no form of government common to the peoples thus segregated, nor tie of language, history, habit, or belief, they were called a Republic.”

Evelyn Waugh book Scoop

Scoop (1938)

“His courtesy was somewhat extravagant. He would write and thank people who wrote to thank him for wedding presents and when he encountered anyone as punctilious as himself the correspondence ended only with death.”

Evelyn Waugh

As quoted in LIFE magazine (8 April 1946)

Evelyn Waugh Quotes about God

“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.”

Evelyn Waugh

Source: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred And Profane Memories Of Captain Charles Ryder

“O God, make me good, but not yet”

Evelyn Waugh

Part 1, start of chapter 5
Brideshead Revisited (1945)
Source: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

“The worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. That is what it would mean; starting a life with you, without Him.”

Evelyn Waugh

Source: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

“I couldn't understand why God had made the world at all…' I asked my bishop; he didn't know. He said that he didn't think the point arose as far as my practical duties as a parish priest were concerned..”

Evelyn Waugh book Decline and Fall

Mr Prendergast, Part One , Chapter IV
Decline and Fall (1928)

“…But I saw today there was one thing unforgivable - like things in the school-room, so bad they were unpunishable, that only mummy could deal with - the bad thing I was on the point of doing, that I'm not quite bad enough to do; to set up a rival good to God's.”

Evelyn Waugh book Brideshead Revisited

Part 3, near end of chapter 5
Brideshead Revisited (1945)

“"We, Seth, Emperor of Azania, Chief of Chiefs of Sakuyu, Lord of Wanda and Tyrant of the Seas, Bachelor of the Arts of Oxford University, being in this the twenty-fourth year of our life, summoned by the wisdom of Almighty God and the unanimous voice of our people to the throne of our ancestors, do hereby proclaim…" Seth paused in his dictation and gazed out across the harbour where in the fresh breeze of early morning the last dhow was setting sail for the open sea. "Rats," he said; "stinking curs. They are all running away."”

Evelyn Waugh book Black Mischief

First lines
Black Mischief (1932)

Evelyn Waugh: Trending quotes

“Was anyone hurt?”

Evelyn Waugh book A Handful of Dust

"No one I am thankful to say," said Mrs. Beaver, "except two housemaids who lost their heads and jumped through a glass roof into the paved court."
First lines
A Handful of Dust (1934)

Hurt

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

Evelyn Waugh

Source: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

Feeling , Past , Future

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

Evelyn Waugh book Vile Bodies

Source: Vile Bodies

Love , Personality

Evelyn Waugh Quotes

“In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice.”

Evelyn Waugh book The Loved One

Source: The Loved One (1948), Chapter 9
Context: In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice. No one would think of making an after-dinner speech without the help of poetry. It used to be the classics, now it's lyric verse.

World

“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.”

Evelyn Waugh

Source: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

Happiness

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

Evelyn Waugh

Source: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

Summer

“To understand all is to forgive all.”

Evelyn Waugh

Source: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

Forgiveness , Understanding

“No one is ever holy without suffering.”

Evelyn Waugh

Source: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

Suffering

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

Evelyn Waugh

Source: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

Weather

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

Evelyn Waugh

Source: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

“These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me.”

Evelyn Waugh

Source: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

Life , Memory , Past

“To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.”

Evelyn Waugh

Part 1, Chapter 1
Brideshead Revisited (1945)
Source: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

Love , Wisdom

“We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them -- a diminishing number in my case.”

Evelyn Waugh

Diaries of Evelyn Waugh (1976) p. 786

“That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty.”

Evelyn Waugh

Source: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

Sadness , Beauty , Silence , Change

“I have a good mind not to take Aloysius to Venice. I don't want him to meet a lot of horrid Italian bears and pick up bad habits.”

Evelyn Waugh

Source: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

“All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day.”

Evelyn Waugh book Vile Bodies

Source: Vile Bodies (1930)

Pleasure , Sleep

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

Evelyn Waugh

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

Evelyn Waugh book Vile Bodies

Source: Vile Bodies

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

Evelyn Waugh

Source: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

Heart

“… she had regained what I thought she had lost forever, the magical sadness which had drawn me to her, the thwarted look that had seemed to say, "Surely I was made for some other purpose than this?”

Evelyn Waugh

Source: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

Sadness

“He did not fail in love, but he lost the joy of it […]”

Evelyn Waugh

Source: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

Love , Joy

“I had been there before; I knew all about it.”

Evelyn Waugh

Source: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

“Soon someone would say the fatal words, "Well, I think it’s time for me to go to bed.”

Evelyn Waugh book Vile Bodies

Source: Vile Bodies

Thinking , Time

“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.”

Evelyn Waugh
World , Future

“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
Love , Fear , Art

“That day was the beginning of my friendship with Sebastian, and thus it came about, that morning in June, that I was lying beside him in the shade of the high elms watching the smoke from his lips drift up into the branches.”

Evelyn Waugh

Source: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

Friendship , Lying

“News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead.”

Evelyn Waugh book Scoop

Source: Scoop (1938)

Reading , Dead

“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.”

Evelyn Waugh book The Loved One

Source: The Loved One

Way , Heart

“Comparisons are odious.”

Evelyn Waugh book A Handful of Dust

A Handful of Dust
Misattributed

“Tomorrow and on every anniversary as long as the Happier Hunting Ground existed a postcard would go to Mr. Joyboy: Your little Aimée is wagging her tail in heaven tonight, thinking of you.”

Evelyn Waugh book The Loved One

Source: The Loved One (1948), Chapter 10

Thinking

“Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.”

Evelyn Waugh

Simone Weil, The Pre-War Notebook (1933-1939), published in First and Last Notebooks (1970) edited by Richard Rees
Misattributed

Art , Effort

“"Was anyone hurt?"
"No one I am thankful to say," said Mrs. Beaver, "except two housemaids who lost their heads and jumped through a glass roof into the paved court."”

Evelyn Waugh book A Handful of Dust

First lines
A Handful of Dust (1934)

Hurt

“"I have been here before," I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.”

Evelyn Waugh book Brideshead Revisited

First lines part 1, chapter 1
Brideshead Revisited (1945)

Mood , Heart , Summer

“It may happen in the next hundred years that the English novelists of the present day will come to be valued as we now value the artists and craftsmen of the late eighteenth century.”

Evelyn Waugh book The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold

First lines
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957)

“You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs—except in England, of course.”

Evelyn Waugh book The Loved One

Source: The Loved One (1948), Chapter 1

Dogs

“There is a great deal to be said for the Arts. For one thing they offer the only career in which commercial failure is not necessarily discreditable.”

Evelyn Waugh

"The Way to Fame" HTTP://BOOKS.GOOGLE.COM/books?&id=FWxbAAAAMAAJ&q=%22there+is+a+great+deal+to+be+said+for+the+arts+for+one+thing+they+offer+the+only+career+in+which+commercial+failure+is+not+necessarily+discreditable%22&pg=PA9#v=onepage

Art , Failure

“Augustus Fagan, Esquire, Ph. D., Llanabba Castle, N. Wales, requires immediately junior assistant to teach Classics and English to University Standard with subsidiary Mathematics, German and French. Experience essential; first-class games essential…
'Might have been made for you,' said Mr Levy.
'But I don't know a word of German, I've had no experience, I've got no testimonials, and I can't play cricket.'
'It doesn't do to be too modest,' said Mr Levy. 'It's wonderful what one can teach when one tries..”

Evelyn Waugh book Decline and Fall

Part One, Chapter One
Decline and Fall (1928)

Game , Mathematics , Universe , Parting

“…I wonder if you remember the story mummy read us the evening Sebastian first got drunk - I mean the bad evening. "Father Brown" said something like "I caught him" (the thief) "with an unseen hook and and invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread."”

Evelyn Waugh book Brideshead Revisited

This quotes The Queer Feet http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/Complete_Father_Brown/chapter3.html by G. K. Chesterton
Brideshead Revisited (1945)

World , Reading

“I expect you'll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That's what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour.”

Evelyn Waugh book Decline and Fall

Decline and Fall (1928)

“No.3 Commando was very anxious to be chums with Lord Glasgow, so they offered to blow up an old tree stump for him and he was very grateful and said don't spoil the plantation of young trees near it because that is the apple of my eye and they said no of course not we can blow a tree down so it falls on a sixpence and Lord Glasgow said goodness you are clever and he asked them all to luncheon for the great explosion.
So Col. Durnford-Slater DSO said to his subaltern, have you put enough explosive in the tree?. Yes, sir, 75lbs. Is that enough? Yes sir I worked it out by mathematics it is exactly right. Well better put a bit more. Very good sir.
And when Col. D Slater DSO had had his port he sent for the subaltern and said subaltern better put a bit more explosive in that tree. I don't want to disappoint Lord Glasgow. Very good sir.
Then they all went out to see the explosion and Col. DS DSO said you will see that tree fall flat at just the angle where it will hurt no young trees and Lord Glasgow said goodness you are clever.
So soon they lit the fuse and waited for the explosion and presently the tree, instead of falling quietly sideways, rose 50 feet into the air taking with it ½ acre of soil and the whole young plantation.
And the subaltern said Sir, I made a mistake, it should have been 7½ not 75. Lord Glasgow was so upset he walked in dead silence back to his castle and when they came to the turn of the drive in sight of his castle what should they find but that every pane of glass in the building was broken.
So Lord Glasgow gave a little cry and ran to hide his emotions in the lavatory and there when he pulled the plug the entire ceiling, loosened by the explosion, fell on his head.
This is quite true.”

Evelyn Waugh

Letter to his wife (31 May 1942)

Disappointment , Mathematics , Tree , Silence

“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.”

Evelyn Waugh book Decline and Fall

Opening lines
Decline and Fall (1928)

“It is typical of Oxford," I said, "to start the new year in autumn.”

Evelyn Waugh book Brideshead Revisited

Part 1, start of chapter 4
Brideshead Revisited (1945)

Autumn

“A copy of Dante's Purgatorio excited his especial disgust."French, eh?" he said. "I guessed as much, and pretty dirty too, I shouldn't wonder. Now just you wait while I look up these here books"—how he said it!—"in my list. Particularly against books the Home Secretary is. If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside."”

Evelyn Waugh book Vile Bodies

Source: Vile Bodies (1930), Chapter 2

Books , Home , Literature , Waiting

“The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are”

Evelyn Waugh book Brideshead Revisited

Part 1, Chapter 3
Brideshead Revisited (1945)

Education

“It's the seed of life we carry about with us like our skeletons, each one of us unconsciously pregnant with desirable villa residences. There's no escape. As individuals we simply do not exist. We are just potential home builders, beavers, and ants. How do we come into being? What is birth?”

Evelyn Waugh book Decline and Fall

Part One, Chapter XII
Decline and Fall (1928)

Life , Home , Birth , Parting

“It is a curious thing… that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.”

Evelyn Waugh book Put Out More Flags

Source: Put Out More Flags (1942), Ch. 1: Autumn, § 7

“I came to the conclusion many years ago that almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.”

Evelyn Waugh book Decline and Fall

Decline and Fall (1928)

“And the only interest about him arises from the unusual series of events of which his shadow was witness.”

Evelyn Waugh book Decline and Fall

Decline and Fall (1928)

“She seemed to say "Look at me. I have done my share. I am beautiful. It is something quite out of the ordinary, this beauty of mine. I am made for delight. But what do I get out of it? Where is my reward?"”

Evelyn Waugh book Brideshead Revisited

Part 3, Chapter 4
Brideshead Revisited (1945)

Beauty

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