Quotes from Evelyn Waugh

That's your little mob in there,' said Grimes; 'you let them out at eleven.' 'But what am I to teach them?' said Paul in sudden panic. 'Oh, I shouldn't try to teach them anything, not just yet, anyway. Just keep them quiet.

Why must you see everything secondhand? Why must this be a play? Why must my conscience be a pre-Raphelite picture?

My sister Cordelia's last report said that she was not only the worst girl in the school, but the worst there had ever been in the memory of the oldest nun.

I always maintain a certain privacy on the sea. One so easily forms acquaintances which become tedious later.

I rejoiced in the Burgundy. It seemed a reminder that the world was an older and better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his.

To the American, English writers are like prim spinsters fidgeting with the china, punctilious about good taste, and inwardly full of thwarted, tepid and perverse passions. We see the Americans as gushing adolescents, repetitive and slangy, rather nasty sometimes in their zest for violence and bad language.

Despite their promises at the last Election, the politicians had not yet changed the climate.

I had felt the brush take life in my hand that afternoon ; I had had my finger in the great, succulent pie of creation. I was a man of the Renaissance that evening — of Browning's renaissance. I, who had walked the streets of Rome in Genoa velvet and had seen the stars through Galileo's tube, spumed the friars, with their dusty tomes and their sunken, jealous eyes and their crabbed hair-splitting speech.

In that dark hour I was aghast to realise that something within me, long sickening, had quietly died. I suddenly knew I had no desire or tenderness or esteem. Nothing remained except the chill bonds of law and duty an custom.

I've just been to Greece to see the buildings there,' said Professor Silenus. 'Did you like them?' 'They are unspeakably ugly. But there were some nice goats.

There were thermal springs, and at the end of the preceding century the town had been laid out modestly as a spa. Hot water still ran in the bath house. Two old gardeners still kept some order in the ornamental grounds. The graded paths, each with a "view-point," the ruins of a seat and of a kiosk, where once invalids had taken their

Various courageous Europeans in the seventies of the last century came to Ishmaelia, or near it, furnished with suitable equipment of cuckoo clocks, phonographs, opera hats, draft-treaties and flags of the nations which they had been obliged to leave.

it was neither the quality nor the quantity that was at fault. It was the mixture.

They are looking for convicts, and as often as not they are rewarded by seeing move across the heath before them a black group of men chained together and uniformly dressed, with a mounted and armed

These men must die to make a world for Hooper; they were the aborigines, vermin by right of law, to be shot at leisure so that things might be safe for the travelling salesmen.

his thoughts, I knew, were far away, in those distant ages where he moved at ease, where time passed in centuries and all the figures were defaced and the names of his companions were corrupt readings of words of quite other meaning.

adore having you. It's only Ian; he was saying tonight he wondered if you wouldn't feel more comfortable if you paid something…

Whenever I see anything lovely nowadays—a building or a piece of scenery—I think to myself, 'that's by Charles.' I see everything through his eyes. He is England to me." I heard her say that; it was the sort of thing she had the habit of saying. Throughout our married life, again and again, I had felt my bowels shrivel within me at the things she said.

The Grace of God is in courtesy';

You must see the garden front and the fountain. He leaned forward and put the car into gear. It's where my family live. And even then, rapt in the vision, I felt, momentarily, like a wind stirring the tapestry, an ominous chill at the words he used--not That is my home, but It's where my family live.

The room was large and faultless. A psychologist, hired from Cambridge, had planned the decorations—magenta and gamboge; colors which—it had been demonstrated by experiments on poultry and mice—conduce to a mood of dignified gaiety. Every day carpet, curtains and upholstery were inspected for signs of disrepair. A gentle whining note filled the apartment, emanating from a plant which was thought to "condition" the atmosphere.

Dennis hesitated with his fingers on the handle and was aware of communication with another hand beyond the panels. Thus in a hundred novels had loves stood.

Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.

The languor of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrevocably, 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.