Evelyn Waugh cytaty

strona 3

„Większość ludzi używa głowy nie do myślenia, lecz do potakiwania.”

„Jan Verney ożenił się z Elżbietą w roku 1938, ale dopiero w zimie 1945 zaczął nienawidzić jej zdecydowanie i żywiołowo.”

„W okresie dojrzewania wszyscy jesteśmy Amerykanami. Umieramy jako Francuzi.”

„Dawniej eksperymentowano w sztuce. Dziś eksperymenty mają być sztuką.”

„Zaręczyny – sensowna instytucja, rodzaj izby wytrzeźwień dla odurzonych.”

„Wielu byłoby chętnych, gdyby droga do nieba nie prowadziła przez cmentarz.”

“A copy of Dante's Purgatorio excited his especial disgust."French, eh?" he said. "I guessed as much, and pretty dirty too, I shouldn't wonder. Now just you wait while I look up these here books"—how he said it!—"in my list. Particularly against books the Home Secretary is. If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside."”

“The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are”

“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?”

“It is a curious thing… that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.”

“I came to the conclusion many years ago that almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.”

“And the only interest about him arises from the unusual series of events of which his shadow was witness.”

“She seemed to say "Look at me. I have done my share. I am beautiful. It is something quite out of the ordinary, this beauty of mine. I am made for delight. But what do I get out of it? Where is my reward?"”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“His courtesy was somewhat extravagant. He would write and thank people who wrote to thank him for wedding presents and when he encountered anyone as punctilious as himself the correspondence ended only with death.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“We possess nothing certainly except the past.”

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

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

“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..”

“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.”

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

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

“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”

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

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

“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.”