Quotes from Evelyn Waugh

And how was she deserved all this hate? She has done nothing except to be loved by someone who was not grown up...if you live with a man you come to know the other woman he has loved. I know Lady Marchmain very well. She is a good and simple woman who has been loved in the wrong way.

I don't believe,' said Mr Prendergast, 'that people would ever fall in love or want to be married if they hadn't been told about it. It's like abroad: no one would want to go there if they hadn't been told it existed. Don't you agree?

Ned, he said, there is one thing I must beg of you. Always wear a tall hat on Sundays during term. It is by that, more than anything, that a man is judged.

The European powers independently decided that they did not want that profitless piece of territory; that the one thing less desirable than seeing a neighbor established there, was the trouble of taking it themselves. Accordingly, by general consent, it was ruled off the maps and its immunity guaranteed. As there was no form of government common to the peoples thus segregated, nor tie of language, history, habit or belief, they were called a Republic.

You killed your grandfather, Erik?' 'Yes, did you not know? I thought it was well known. I was very young at the time and had taken a lot of sixty per cent. It was with a chopper.

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. By chance I met this same wine again, lunching with my wine merchant in St. James's Street, in the first autumn of the war; it had softened and faded in the intervening years, but it still spoke in the pure, authentic accent of its prime, the same words of hope. "I

A blow, expected, repeated, falling upon a bruise with no smart or shock of surprise, only a dull and sickening pain and the doubt whether another like it could be borne.

I aches," said Mrs. Jackson with simple dignity. "I aches terrible all round the sit-upon. It's the damp.

To Father Rothschild no passage was worse than any other. He thought of the sufferings of the saints, the mutability of human nature, the Four Last Things, and between whiles repeated snatches of the penitential psalms.

Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches.

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

Here my last love died. There was nothing remarkable in the manner of its death.

Who asked you to the funeral anyway? Were you acquainted with the late parrot?

Mi piacerebbe sotterrare qualcosa di prezioso in ogni posto dove sono stato felice e poi, una volta diventato vecchio brutto e povero, potrei sempre tornare a estrarlo e ricordare.

Lady Marchmain,10 no I am not on her side; but God is, who suffers fools gladly;

Algernon Stitch was standing in the hall; his bowler hat was on his head; his right hand, grasping a crimson, royally emblazoned dispatch case, emerged from the left sleeve of his overcoat; his other hand burrowed petulantly in his breast pocket. An umbrella under his left arm further inconvenienced him. He spoke indistinctly, for he was holding a folded copy of the morning paper between his teeth. "Can't get it on," he seemed to say.

What is a 'canty day,' Dennis?" "I've never troubled to ask. Something like Hogmanay, I expect." "What is that?" "People being sick on the pavement in Glasgow." "Oh.

And why wouldn't I be seeing all that dough going on relations they've hated all their lives, while the pets who've loved them and stood by them, never asked no questions, never complained, rich or poor, sickness or health, get buried anyhow like they was just animals?

In the week which preceded the outbreak of the Second World War – days of surmise and apprehension which cannot, without irony, be called the last days of peace – and on the Sunday morning when all doubts were finally resolved and misconceptions corrected, three rich women thought first and mainly of Basil Seal.

One can have no idea what the suffering may be, to be maimed as he is — no dignity, no power of will. No one is ever holy without suffering. It's taken that form with him ... I've seen so much suffering in the last few years; there's so much coming for everybody soon. It's the spring of love ...

Do you know last year, when I thought I was going to have a child, I'd decided to have it brought up a Catholic? I hadn't thought about religion before; I haven't since; but just at that time, when I was was waiting for the birth, I thought, 'That's the one thing I can give her. It doesn't seem to have done me much good, but my child shall have it.' It was odd, wanting to give something one had lost oneself

Now for the first time he was far from shore, submerged among deep waters, below wind and tide, where huge trees raised their spongy flowers and monstrous things without fur or feather, wing or foot, passed silently, in submarine twilight. A lush place.

Most of my day is spent dealing with pathetic people of confused nationality seeking to escape the horrors of liberation.

This, I did not need telling, was Anthony Blanche, the "aesthete" par excellence, a byword of iniquity from Cherwell Edge to Somerville.