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Evelyn Waugh Quotes
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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
Evelyn Waugh: 123   quotes 8   likes

Evelyn Waugh Quotes

“I put the words down and push them a bit.”

Evelyn Waugh

As quoted in his obituary in The New York Times (11 April 1966)

“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 book Brideshead Revisited

Brideshead Revisited (1945)

Love , Sadness , Disappointment , Search

“Please bear in mind throughout that IT IS MEANT TO BE FUNNY.”

Evelyn Waugh book Decline and Fall

Author's note
Decline and Fall (1928)

“That's the public-school system all over. They may kick you out, but they never let you down.”

Evelyn Waugh book Decline and Fall

Decline and Fall (1928)

School

“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.”

Evelyn Waugh book Decline and Fall

Decline and Fall (1928)

Sleep

“There will be a prize of half a crown for the longest essay, irrespective of any possible merit.”

Evelyn Waugh book Decline and Fall

Decline and Fall (1928)

“Aesthetic value is often the by-product of the artist striving to do something else.”

Evelyn Waugh

Diaries of Evelyn Waugh (1976)

“Lord Copper quite often gave banquets; it would be an understatement to say that no one enjoyed them more than the host, for no one else enjoyed them at all, while Lord Copper positively exulted in every minute.”

Evelyn Waugh book Scoop

Scoop (1938)

“Of children as of procreation— the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable.”

Evelyn Waugh

Letter to Nancy Mitford, May 5, 1954, cited from Mark Amory (ed.) The Letters of Evelyn Waugh (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982) p. 423
"The pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable" is sometimes attributed to Lord Chesterfield (British statesman, diplomat and wit, 1694-1773), but has not been found in his works.

Children , Pleasure

“Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums who find prison so soul-destroying.”

Evelyn Waugh book Decline and Fall

Decline and Fall (1928)

People , School , Feeling , Home

“We possess nothing certainly except the past.”

Evelyn Waugh book Brideshead Revisited

Part 3, start of chapter 1
Brideshead Revisited (1945)

Past

“Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.”

Evelyn Waugh book Scoop

An oft-quoted example of William Boot's style. When first mentioned in the novel it is "splashy" and not "plashy", but this is a remembrance of another journalist; when Boot himself quotes it, he has "plashy".
Scoop (1938)

“His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing and jazz — everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime.”

Evelyn Waugh book The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold

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

“They should have told me that at the end of that gay journey and flower-strewn path were the hideous lights of home and the voices of children.”

Evelyn Waugh book Decline and Fall

Decline and Fall (1928)

Children , Home , Flowers , Light

“Creative Endeavour lost her wings, Mrs. Ape.”

Evelyn Waugh book Vile Bodies

Source: Vile Bodies (1930), Chapter 1

“Other nations use 'force'; we Britons alone use 'Might.”

Evelyn Waugh book Scoop

Scoop (1938)

“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 book Decline and Fall

Decline and Fall (1928)

Drawing , Personality

“While still a young man, John Courteney Boot had, as his publisher proclaimed, "achieved an assured and enviable position in contemporary letters."”

Evelyn Waugh book Scoop

Opening lines
Scoop (1938)

“I had warned my father that my viva might mean a second. It meant a third, and I was overcome with regret, not, I am ashamed to say, for the giddy nights, but for the sober ones. I had not done much work, but I had done some. Had I known I was only to get a third I would not have wasted my time.”

Evelyn Waugh

"Is Oxford Worth the Money?", Sunday Dispatch, 10 July 1938, page 12. Quoted in "The Sayings of Evelyn Waugh", edited by Donat Gallagher, Duckworth Sayings Series

Time , Night

“All day the heat had been barely supportable but at evening a breeze arose in the West, blowing from the heart of the setting sun and from the ocean, which lay unseen, unheard behind the scrubby foothills. It shook the rusty fringes of palm-leaf and swelled the dry sounds of summer, the frog-voices, the grating cicadas, and the ever present pulse of music from the neighbouring native huts.”

Evelyn Waugh book The Loved One

First lines
The Loved One (1948)

Music , Support , Sun , Heart

“Don't give your opinions about Art and the Purpose of Life. They are of little interest and, anyway, you can't express them. Don't analyze yourself. Give the relevant facts and let your readers make their own judgments. Stick to your story. It is not the most important subject in history but it is one about which you are uniquely qualified to speak.”

Evelyn Waugh

Reviewing World within World, the autobiography of Stephen Spender, in The Tablet (5 May 1951)

Life , Art , History

“You see my adjutant made rather a silly mistake. He hadn't had much truck with boots before and the silly fellow thought they were extra rations. My men ate the whole bag of tricks last night.”

Evelyn Waugh book Black Mischief

Source: Black Mischief (1932), Chapter 5

Men , Night

“The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.”

Evelyn Waugh book Put Out More Flags

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

“…Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and the plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them. But when dear Sebastian speaks it is like a little sphere of soapsud drifting off the end of an old clay pipe, anywhere, full of rainbow light for a second and then - phut! vanished, with nothing left at all, nothing.”

Evelyn Waugh book Brideshead Revisited

Part 1, Chapter 2
Brideshead Revisited (1945)

Light

“Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.”

Evelyn Waugh book A Little Learning

First lines
A Little Learning (1964)

Age , Future

“But what am I to teach them?' said Paul in sudden panic.”

Evelyn Waugh book Decline and Fall

Decline and Fall (1928)

“We class schools, you see, into four grades: Leading School, First-rate School, Good School, and School. Frankly," said Mr Levy, "School is pretty bad…”

Evelyn Waugh book Decline and Fall

Part One, Chapter One
Decline and Fall (1928)

School , Parting

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

Evelyn Waugh book Scoop

Scoop (1938)

Wisdom

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

Evelyn Waugh book Decline and Fall

Decline and Fall (1928)

People , Sex

“Your action, and your action alone, determines your worth.”

Evelyn Waugh

Johann Gottlieb Fichte in The Vocation of Man [Die Bestimmung des Menschen] (1800), p. 94 : "You are here, not for idle contemplation of yourself, not for brooding over devout sensations — no, for action you are here; action, and action alone, determines your worth." [Nicht zum müßigen Beschauen und Betrachten deiner selbst, oder zum Brüten über andächtigen Empfindungen, — nein, zum Handeln bist du da; dein Handeln und allein dein Handeln bestimmt deinen Werth.]
Misattributed

“The Beast stands for strong mutually antagonistic governments everywhere," he said. "Self-sufficiency at home, self-assertion abroad.”

Evelyn Waugh book Scoop

A quote from Lord Copper.
Scoop (1938)

Home , Strong

“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 book Brideshead Revisited

First lines of Prologue
Brideshead Revisited (1945)

“O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin.”

Evelyn Waugh book Brideshead Revisited

Brideshead Revisited (1945)

God , Forgiveness

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

Evelyn Waugh

Source: Diary entry (March 1964), after hearing that doctors had removed a benign tumor from Randolph Churchill, quoted in The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Michael Davie (1976), p. 792

Science , Parting

“How ungenerously in later life we disclaim the virtuous moods of our youth, living in retrospect long, summer days of unreflecting dissipation. There is no candour in a story of early manhood which leaves out of account the home-sickness for nursery morality, the regrets and resolutions of amendment, the black hours which, like zero on the roulette table, turn up with roughly calculable regularity.”

Evelyn Waugh book Brideshead Revisited

Brideshead Revisited (1945)

Life , Youth , Home , Mood

“My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.”

Evelyn Waugh book Brideshead Revisited

Brideshead Revisited (1945)

War , Memory , Time

“I have lived carefully, sheltered myself from the cold winds, eaten moderately of what was in season, drunk fine claret, slept in my own sheets; I shall live long.”

Evelyn Waugh book Brideshead Revisited

Part 3, chapter 5, Lord Marchmain's dying soliloquy.
Brideshead Revisited (1945)

Season

“Don't hold your parents up to contempt. After all, you are their son, and it is just possible that you may take after them.”

Evelyn Waugh

The Tablet (9 May 1951)

Parent

“Up to a point, Lord Copper.”

Evelyn Waugh book Scoop

Lord Copper, proprietor of the Daily Beast is a man to whom one never says 'No' directly. This is what one says instead.
Scoop (1938)

“So the two of them went to London by the early morning train. 'Let's surprise her,' said Nigel, but Cedric telephoned first, wryly remembering the story of the pedantic adulterer - 'My dear, it is I who am surprised; you are astounded.”

Evelyn Waugh book Put Out More Flags

Source: Put Out More Flags (1942), Ch. 3 : Spring

Training

“What is this impulse of two people to build their beastly home? It's you & me, unborn, asserting our presence. All we are is a manifestation of the impulse to family life, and if by chance we have escaped the itch ourselves, Nature forces it upon us another way.”

Evelyn Waugh book Decline and Fall

Part One, Chapter XII
Decline and Fall (1928)

Life , People , Family , Way

“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 book Decline and Fall

Decline and Fall (1928)

Love , People

“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...”

Evelyn Waugh book Black Mischief

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."
First lines
Black Mischief (1932)

God , People , Art , Universe

“I have become very old in the last two years. Not diseased but enfeebled. There is nowhere I want to go and nothing I want to do and I am conscious of being an utter bore. The Vatican Council has knocked the guts out of me.”

Evelyn Waugh

Letter to Lady Mosley (9 March 1966), quoted in The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Mark Amory (1980), p. 638

Disease

“I find the new liturgy a temptation against Faith, Hope and Charity but I shall never, pray God, apostatise.”

Evelyn Waugh

Letter to Monsignor McReavy (15 April 1965), quoted in The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Mark Amory (1980), p. 631

God , Faith , Hope

“Nice to go to Rome. They are destroying all that was superficially attractive about my Church. It is a great sorrow to me and for once undeserved. If you see Cardinal Bea spit in his eye.”

Evelyn Waugh

Letter to Lady Diana Cooper (7 February 1965), quoted in A Bitter Trial: Evelyn Waugh and John Carmel Cardinal Heenan on the Liturgical Changes: Expanded Edition, ed. Alcuin Reid (2001), p. 68