Evelyn Waugh Quotes

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

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

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

Source: Vile Bodies

Evelyn Waugh Quotes

“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.”

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.

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

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

“To understand all is to forgive all.”

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

“No one is ever holy without suffering.”

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

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

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

“There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair.”

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

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

Source: Vile Bodies

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

Diaries of Evelyn Waugh (1976) p. 786

“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.”

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.”

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

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

Source: Vile Bodies (1930)

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

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

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

Source: Vile Bodies

“… 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?”

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

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

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

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

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.”

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

“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.”

Source: Vile Bodies

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

Evelyn Waugh book Scoop

Source: Scoop (1938)

“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.”

“My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.”

Source: The Loved One

“Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.”

“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.”

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

Source: The Loved One (1948), Chapter 10

“"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."”

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

Evelyn Waugh book A Handful of Dust

First lines
A Handful of Dust (1934)

“"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)

“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.”

“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.”

Source: The Loved One (1948), Chapter 1

“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..”

"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

Evelyn Waugh book Decline and Fall

Part One, Chapter One
Decline and Fall (1928)

“…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 <br class="br">Brideshead Revisited (1945)

“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.”