Evelyn Waugh Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“If a thing's worth doing at all, it's worth doing well.”
-- Evelyn WaughSource : EVELYN WAUGH (1958). “VILE BODIES & BLACK MISCHIEF”
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“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 -
“Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.”
-- Evelyn WaughSource : Michael Davie (ed.) Diaries of Evelyn Waugh (1976) "Irregular Notes 1960-65," 26 Mar. 1962
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“One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.”
-- Evelyn Waugh -
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“Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.”
-- Evelyn Waugh -
“Beer commercials are so patriotic: Made the American Way. What does that have to do with America? Is that what America stands for? Feeling sluggish and urinating frequently?”
-- Evelyn Waugh -
“... To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.”
-- Evelyn WaughSource : Evelyn Waugh (2012). “Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder”, p.49, Penguin UK
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“After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can't trust a person.”
-- Evelyn Waugh -
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“Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.”
-- Evelyn WaughSource : Evelyn Waugh (1958). “The world of Evelyn Waugh”
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“I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live but I am told that this is a common experience.”
-- Evelyn WaughSource : Evelyn Waugh, Mark Amory (1980). “The letters of Evelyn Waugh”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH)
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“Beware of writing to me. I always answer ... My father spent the last 20 years of his life writing letters. If someone thanked him for a wedding present, he thanked them for thanking him and there was no end to the exchange but death.”
-- Evelyn Waugh -
“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 -
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“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 -
“But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.”
-- Evelyn Waugh -
“What is youth except a man or a woman before it is ready or fit to be seen.”
-- Evelyn Waugh -
“There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair.”
-- Evelyn Waugh -
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“Port is not for the very young, the vain and the active. It is the comfort of age and the companion of the scholar and the philosopher”
-- Evelyn Waugh -
“He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending to be whole.”
-- Evelyn Waugh -
“The truth is that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up.”
-- Evelyn Waugh -
“Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.”
-- Evelyn Waugh -
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“We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them.”
-- Evelyn WaughSource : "Diaries of Evelyn Waugh" by Evelyn Waugh, (p. 786), 1976.
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“Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist.”
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“We can trace almost all the disasters of English history to the influence of Wales.”
-- Evelyn Waugh -
“Limbo is the place. In Limbo one has natural happiness without the beatific vision; no harps; no communal order; but wine and conversation and imperfect, various humanity. Limbo for the unbaptized, for the pious heathen, the sincere sceptic.”
-- Evelyn Waugh -
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“An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.”
-- Evelyn WaughSource : "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.
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“Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.”
-- Evelyn WaughSource : In Observer 15 Apr. 1962
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“It doesn't matter what people call you unless they call you pigeon pie and eat you up.”
-- Evelyn Waugh -
“The langour of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth - all save this come and go with us through life...These things are a part of life itself; but languor - the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding, the sun standing still in the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse - that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it.”
-- Evelyn Waugh -
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“We class schools into four grades: leading school, first-rate school, good school and school.”
-- Evelyn Waugh -
“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
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