Evelyn Waugh: Likeness

Evelyn Waugh was British writer. Explore interesting quotes on likeness.
Evelyn Waugh: 246 quotes8 likes

“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

“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

“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

“…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)

“…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)

“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)

“…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)

“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)

“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)