Quotes from Evelyn Waugh

We think it a very promising little war. A microcosm, as you might say, of world drama.

There is proverbially a mystery among most men of new wealth, how they made their first ten thousand; it is the qualities they showed then, before they became bullies, when every man was someone to be placated, when only hope sustained them and they could count on nothing from the world but what could be charmed from it, that make them, if they survive their triumph, successful with women.

The best I can tell you in that way is that I'm much more at ease with fellow-Catholics than I am with heathens or Protestants. One has so many basic assumptions in common that there's so much that doesn't need saying, and when you're talking to even the most amusing and intelligent heathen you suddenly find that something you've said has no meaning at all to them.

Outside—and, in one or two places, inside—the rain fell in torrents.

Tead, kui ma vaatan seda oma suurt kinniseotud jalga, siis ma ei saa lahti tundest, et mul on podagra, ja see tekitab hirmsat ?šampuseisu.

We must go quickly before my sister gets back. Which are you ashamed of, her or me? I'm ashamed of myself, said Sebastian gravely. I'm not going to have you get mixed up with my family. They're so madly charming. All my life they've been taking thongs from me. If they once got hold of you with your charm, they'd make you their friend not mine, and I won't let them.

chokey cholmondley: i sure am crazy about culture.

The day before I would have said: 'There aren't two sides'; that day I said, 'No, I'm with you.

Civilization – and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organization of Europe – has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity, and without it has no significance or power to command allegiance…That is the first discovery, that Christianity is essential to civilization and that it is in greater need of combative strength than it has been for centuries.

Oh, I shouldn't try to teach them anything, not just yet, anyway. Just keep them quiet.

It was dead contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the tangle of wire. Here she and I, who were never friends before, met on terms of long and unbroken intimacy

You know, he added reflectively, we've got a much easier job now than we should have had fifty years ago. If we'd had to modernise a country then it would have meant constitutional monarchy, bicameral legislature, proportional representation, women's suffrage, independent judicature, freedom of the press, referendums . . . What is all that? asked the Emperor. Just a few ideas that have ceased to be modern.

I distinctly remember last Christmas seeing you together and thinking how happy you looked, and wondering why. You'll find it very disturbing, you know, starting off again. How old are you—thirty-four? That's no age to be starting.

Wars don't start nowadays because people want them. We long for peace, and fill our newspapers with conferences about disarmament and arbitration, but there is a radical instability in our whole world order, and soon we shall all be walking into the jaws of destruction again, protesting our pacific intentions.

Impotence and sodomy are socially O.K. but birth control is flagrantly middle-class.

I'm in the soup!

A wonderfully congenial group who live by a unique set of social standards. According to their rules, any sin is acceptable provided it is carried off in good taste.

From this task of ordered discrimination he had been thrown into the ruthless, cut-throat, rough-and-tumble of the Beast's Woman's Page.

It's frightening, Julia once said, to think how completely you have forgotten Sebastian. He was the forerunner. That's what you said in the storm. I've thought since: perhaps I am only a forerunner, too.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along; he must offer some little opposition. Even the great Victorian artists were all anti-Victorian, despite the pressures to conform.

The effects of their drinks had now entered on that secondary stage, vividly described in temperance handbooks, when the momentary illusion of well-being and exhilaration gives place to melancholy, indigestion and moral decay.

As a rule there is one thing you can always count on in our job — popularity. There are plenty of disadvantages I grant you, but you are liked and respected. Ring people up any hour of the day or night, butt into their houses uninvited make them answer a string of damn fool questions when they want to do something else — they like it. Always a smile and the best of everything for the gentlemen of the Press.

But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself from His mercy. That is what it would mean; starting a life with you, without Him. One can only hope to see one step ahead. But I saw today there was one thing unforgivable — like things in the schoolroom, so bad they are unpunishable, that only Mummy could deal with — the bad thing I was on the point of doing, that I'm not quite bad enough to do; to set up a rival good to God's.

The Second World War wasn't bad provided you were with nice people.