Evelyn Waugh: Trending quotes

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Evelyn Waugh: 246 quotes8 likes

“[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)

“One can write, think and pray exclusively of others; dreams are all egocentric.”

Evelyn Waugh

Diary entry (5 October 1962)

“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

“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)

“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)

“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

“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

“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

“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.

“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

“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

“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

“To understand all is to forgive all.”

Evelyn Waugh

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

“No one is ever holy without suffering.”

Evelyn Waugh

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

“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

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

Evelyn Waugh book Vile Bodies

Source: Vile Bodies

“… 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