Quotes from Evelyn Waugh

There's a blessed equity in the English social system,' said Grimes, 'that ensures the public school man against starvation. One goes through four or five years of perfect hell at an age when life is bound to be hell anyway, and after that the social system never lets one down.

That's the public school system all over. They may kick you out, but they never let you down.

Here, in one of the smaller oval frames, I sketched a romantic landscape, and in the days that followed filled it out in colour, and, by luck and the happy mood of the moment, made a success of it. The brush seemed somehow to do what was wanted of it. It was a landscape without figures, a summer scene of white cloud and blue distances, with an ivy-clad ruin in the foreground, rocks and a waterfall affording a rugged introduction to the receding parkland behind.

in that city there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.

Many were already on Lord Copper's pay-roll and they thus found their working day prolonged by some three hours without recompense—with the forfeit, indeed, of the considerable expenses of dressing up, coming out at night, and missing the last train home; those who were normally the slaves of other masters were, Lord Copper felt, his for the evening.

D'you know, Bridey, if I ever felt for a moment like becoming a Catholic, I should only have to talk to you for five minutes to be cured. You manage to reduce what seem quite sensible propositions to stark nonsense." "It's odd you should say that. I've heard it before from other people. It's one of the many reasons why I don't think I should make a good priest.

Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer has become impossible and your heart has turned to stone.

And we would leave the golden candlelight of the dining-room for the starlight outside and sit on the edge of the fountain, cooling our hands in the water and listening drunkenly to its splash and gurgle over the rocks. 'Ought we to be drunk every night?' Sebastian asked one morning. 'Yes, I think so.' ' I think so too.

Quando la gente odia con tanta foga, vuol dire che odia qualcosa che ha dentro di sé.

As ants, so soldiers. In the years to come he was to see the process at work again and again, sometimes in grim circumstances, sometimes in pleasant domesticity. Men unnaturally removed from wives and family began at once to build substitute homes, to paint and furnish, to make flower-beds and edge them with white-washed pebbles, to stitch cushion-covers on lonely gun-sites.

I do not aspire to advise my sovereign in her choice of servants.

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.

I do not seek to scrape acquaintance with Lady Celia; I do not want my photograph in the Tatler, I have not come to exhibit myself.

He was like a friend made on board ship, on the high seas; now we had come to his home port.

Conversion is like stepping across the chimney piece out of a Looking-Glass world, where everything is an absurd caricature into the real world God made; and then begins the delicious process of exploring it limitlessly.

After all, he reflected, his whole uniform was a disguise, his whole new calling a masquerade.

Henceforth I live in a world of three dimensions—with the aid of my five senses." I have since learned that there is no such world

Here it seemed some of them slept for there were divan beds covered with blankets only and a large, much undenticulated, comb.

There are two distinct kinds of meanness - those which come of loving money and of disliking it. Mine was the latter sort.

It was his misfortune to be respected as a writer by almost everyone except those with whom he most consorted.

When it was done, Guy studied himself once more in the glass and recognized an old acquaintance he could never cut, to whom he could never hope to give the slip for long, the uncongenial fellow traveler who would accompany him through life.

Incidents of this kind constantly occurred when Basil was on a racket.

There should be a drug for soldiers, Guy thought, to put them to sleep until they were needed. They should repose among the briar like the knights of the Sleeping Beauty; they should be laid away in their boxes in the nursery cupboard. This unvarying cycle of excitement and disappointment rubbed them bare of paint and exposed the lead beneath.

Man is never beautiful; he is never happy except when he becomes the channel for the distribution of mechanical forces.