Quotes from Evelyn Waugh

We schoolmasters must temper discretion with deceit.

If everyone at twenty realized that half his life was to be lived after forty…

It was as though a deed of conveyance of her narrow loins had been drawn and sealed. I was making my first entry as the freeholder of a property I would enjoy and develop at leisure.

have been in the scholastic profession long enough to know that nobody enters it unless he has some very good reason which he is anxious to conceal.

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

For Guy the news quickened the sickening suspicion he had tried to ignore, had succeeded in ignoring more often than not in his service in the Halberdiers; that he was engaged in a war in which courage and a just cause were quite irrelevant to the issue.

Ah well, to the journalist every country is rich.

Mummy and two attendant poets have three bad colds in the head, so I have come here. It is the feast of S. Nichodemus of Thyatira, who was martyred by having goatskin nailed to his pate, and is accordingly the patron of bald heads. Tell Collins, who I am sure will be bald before us. There are too many people here, but one, praise heaven! has an ear-trumpet, and that keeps me in good humor. And now I must try to catch a fish. It is too far to send it to you so I will keep the backbone…

Why did you marry her? Physical attraction. Ambition. Everyone agrees she's the ideal wife for a painter. Loneliness, missing Sebastian. You loved him, didn't you? Oh yes. He was the frontrunner. Julia understood.

There's nothing wrong in being a physical wreck, you know. There's no moral obligation to be Postmaster-General or Master of Foxhounds or to live to walk ten miles at eighty.

But how do you know He *doesn't* want us to have it—the cross, I mean? I bet He's just waiting for one of us to go and find it—just at this moment when it's most needed. Just at this moment when everyone is forgetting it and chattering about the hypostatic union, there's a solid chunk of wood waiting for them to have their silly heads knocked against. I'm going off to find it

Under this liberal and progressive regime, the republic may be said, in some ways, to have prospered.

But she spoke as though it were a matter of weeks rather than of years; as though, too, before our parting we had been firm friends. 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.

I returned to London in the spring of 1926 for the General Strike. It was the topic of Paris. The French, exultant as always at the discomfiture of their former friends, and transposing into their own precise terms our mistier notions from across the Channel, foretold revolution and civil war.

If she apostatized now, having been brought up in the Church, she would go to hell, while the Protestant girls of her acquaintance, schooled in happy ignorance, could marry eldest sons, live at peace with their world, and get to heaven before her.

We don't get much time to read the papers." "No, I suppose you don't. I envy you. There's nothing in them but lies," he added sadly. "You can't believe a word they say. But it's all good. Very good indeed. It helps to keep one's spirits up," he said from the depths of his gloom.

Have you told Julia this about Sebastian?" "The substance of it; not quite as I told you. She never loved him, you know, as we do." " Do. " The word reproached me; there was no past tense in Cordelia's verb "to love.

How ungenerously in later life we disclaim the virtuous moods of our youth, living in retrospect long summer days of unreflecting dissipation.

Did you have a little talk with mummy?' 'Yes.' 'Have you gone over to her side?' The day before I would have said: 'There aren't two sides'; that day I said, 'No, I'm with you, Sebastian contra mundum.

I had felt the brush take life in my hand that afternoon; I was a man of 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, spurned the friars, with their dusty tomes and their sunken, jealous eyes and their crabbed hair-splitting speech.

The perfect leisure which those people alone enjoy who are untroubled by the speculative or artistic itch.

It was during that term that I began to realise that Sebastian was a drunkard in quite a different sense to myself. I got drunk often, but through an excess of high spirits, in the love of the moment, and the wish to prolong and enchant it; Sebastian drank to escape.

f]ortune is the lease capricious of deities, and arranges things on the just and rigid system that no one shall be very happy for very long.

Perhaps that's one of the pleasures of building, like having a son, wondering how he'll grow up. I don't know; I never built anything, and I forfeited the right to watch my son grow up. I'm homeless, childless, middle-aged, loveless, Hooper.