Quotes from Evelyn Waugh

Randolph Churchill went into hospital… to have a lung removed. It was announced that the trouble was not "malignant."… It was a typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.

She had heard someone say something about an Independent Labour Party, and was furious that she had not been asked.

Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.

The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.

Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.

One can write, think and pray exclusively of others; dreams are all egocentric.

I expect you'll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That's what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behavior.

We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for our ability to amuse them.

If it could only be like this always — always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe...

Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums… who find prison so soul destroying.

But in the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. No one would think of making an after-dinner speech without the help of poetry. It used to be the classics, now it's lyric verse.

After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can't trust a person.

We will not have any Dickens today… but tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. Let us read Little Dorrit again.

"What war?" said the Prime Minister sharply. "No one has said anything to me about a war. I really think I should have been told. I'll be damned," he said defiantly, "if they shall have a war without consulting me. What's a cabinet for, if there's not more mutual confidence than that? What do they want a war for, anyway?"

His courtesy was somewhat extravagant. He would write and thank people who wrote to thank him for wedding presents and when he encountered anyone as punctilious as himself the correspondence ended only with death.

Of children as of procreation - the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable.

Other nations use force; we Britons alone use Might.

Saints are simply men and women who have fulfilled their natural obligation which is to approach God.

What is youth except a man or a woman before it is ready or fit to be seen?

Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.

After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can't trust a person.

If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be.

If it could only be like this always – always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper...

O God, make me good, but not yet.