Evelyn Waugh citations (123 citations, Page 3)

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.

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Evelyn Waugh livre Decline and Fall

Decline and Fall (1928)

“We possess nothing certainly except the past.”

Help us translate this quote

Evelyn Waugh livre Brideshead Revisited

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

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

Help us translate this quote

Evelyn Waugh livre 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.”

Help us translate this quote

Evelyn Waugh livre The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold

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

“I couldn't understand why God had made the world at all…' I asked my bishop; he didn't know. He said that he didn't think the point arose as far as my practical duties as a parish priest were concerned..”

Help us translate this quote

Evelyn Waugh livre Decline and Fall

Mr Prendergast, Part One , Chapter IV
Decline and Fall (1928)

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Evelyn Waugh livre Decline and Fall

Decline and Fall (1928)

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

Help us translate this quote

Evelyn Waugh livre Vile Bodies

Source: Vile Bodies (1930), Chapter 1

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

Help us translate this quote

Evelyn Waugh livre 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”

Help us translate this quote

Evelyn Waugh livre Decline and Fall

Decline and Fall (1928)

“I'm one of the blind alleys off the main road of procreation.”

Help us translate this quote

Evelyn Waugh livre Decline and Fall

Grimes
Decline and Fall (1928)

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

Help us translate this quote

Evelyn Waugh livre 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.”

Help us translate this quote

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