Evelyn Waugh Quotes

Change is the only evidence of life.

Success in this world depends on knowing exactly how little effort each job is worth...distribution ...

Rex, in his early forties, had grown heavy and ruddy; he had lost his Canadian accent and acquired i...

The languor of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost!

Aunt Fanny tells me you made great friends with Mr. Mottram. I'm sure he can't be very nice.''I don'...

As my intimacy with his family grew, I became part of the world which he sought to escape; I became ...

It [being very rich] used to worry me, and I thought it wrong to have so many beautiful things when ...

I loved buildings that had grown silently with the centuries, catching the best of each generation w...

The worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. That is what it would m...

It was not her way to make a conspicuous entry into anyone’s life, but towards the end of that week ...

Miss Runcible wore trousers and Miles touched up his eye-lashes in the dining-room of the hotel wher...

All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day.

After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can't trust a person.

Her heart was broken perhaps, but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture. In a wider ...

At a banquet given in his honour Sir Jocelyn Hitchcock once modestly attributed his success in life ...

As a rule there is one thing you can always count on in our job — popularity. There are plenty of di...

Ah well, to the journalist every country is rich.

As there was no form of government common to the peoples thus segregated, nor tie of language, histo...

Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller a...

The way ran zigzag through a forest of pine which the bitter wind, still that morning, had turned to...

Oh, why did nobody warn me?" cried Grimes in agony. "I should have been told. They should have told ...

The problem of architecture as I see it is the problem of all art – the elimination of the human ele...

...any one who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison...

When the waterholes were dry, people sought to drink at the mirage.

The langour of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! Th...

Sebastian is in love with his own childhood. That will make him very unhappy.

It (modernization) is just another jungle closing in.

Instruction would be wasted on me. Just to give me the form and I'll sign on the dotted line.

I walked down the empty Broad to breakfast, as I often did on Sundays, at a tea-shop opposite Ballio...

I am sorry to disturb you,' said James politely, 'but these people wished to shoot us.

There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair.

Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, ...

...for in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy...

Two wives despaired of him,’ he said. ‘When he got engaged to Sylvia, she made it a condition that h...

It was a small tortoise with Julia’s initials set in diamonds in the living shell, and this slightly...

So through a world of piety I made my way to Sebastian.

I suppose it's something to do with her black-brained religion not to take care of the body.

I've always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the more I ...

I have a good mind not to take Aloysius to Venice. I don't want him to meet a lot of horrid Italian ...

Do you want to change?" "It's the only evidence of life.

I’ve always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the more I ...

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.These memorie...

No one is ever holy without suffering.

Oh, my darling, why is it that love makes me hate the world? It's supposed to have quite the opposit...

If she looked further than the wedding, it was to see marriage as the beginning of individual existe...

I'll pray for you.""That's very kind of you.""I can't spare you a whole rosary, you know. Just a dec...

One of the problems of the vacation is money, father.”“Oh, I shouldn’t worry about a thing like that...

He lay back for a little in his bed thinking about the smells of food… of the intoxicating breath of...

One does not travel, any more than one falls in love, to collect material. It is simply part of one'...

Then they began saying, "Get hold of him. Put him in Mercury." Now as you know I have two sculptures...

I knew it all, the whole drab compass of marital disillusion; we had been through it together, the A...

Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.

The truth is that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a ce...

I know I am awful. But how much more awful I should be without the Faith.

It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one's youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to ta...

You'll find you spend half your second year shaking off the undesirable friends you made in your fir...

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

I knew it all, the whole drab compass of marital disillusion; we had been through it together, the A...

He was fortified by a memory which kept only the good things and rejected the ill. Despite his sorro...

Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and plates, up and over, in and out, good soli...

I was thinking about honour. It's a thing that changes doesn't it? I mean, a hundred and fifty years...

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.

I used to know Brian Howard well -- a dazzling young man to my innocent eyes. In later life he becam...

Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.

I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.

There is nothing to be gained by multiplying social distinctions indefinitely.

We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us but for ours to amuse them.

He was not at all what is called ‘a character’. He was an innocent, affable old man who had somehow ...

We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us but for ours to amuse them.

My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally...

Civilization – and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygie...

Peter Pastmaster and the absurdly youthful colonel of the new force were drawing up a list of suitab...

We schoolmasters must temper discretion with deceit.

You can't ever tell what's going to hurt people.

A whole Gothic world had come to grief...there was now no armour glittering through the forest glade...

We, Seth, Emperor of Azania, Chief of the Chiefs of Sakuyu, Lord of Wanda and Tyrant of the Seas, Ba...

No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can't really hate God either. When they want to H...

My father greeted me with his usual air of mild regret.

If it could only be like this always – always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysi...