Evelyn Waugh citations

Page 2

“… 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?”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Comparisons are odious.”

“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.”

“"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."”

“"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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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..”

“…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."”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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