Quotes from Evelyn Waugh

I can't bare you when you're not amusing.

You can't ever tell what's going to hurt people.

He did not fail in love, but he lost the joy of it [...]

I had been there before; I knew all about it.

But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into the depths of confusion you didn't know existed.

Mr. Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.

That day was the beginning of my friendship with Sebastian, and thus it came about, that morning in June, that I was lying beside him in the shade of the high elms watching the smoke from his lips drift up into the branches.

News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read.

Old boy, said Grimes, you're in love. Nonsense! Smitten? said Grimes. No, no. The tender passion? No. Cupid's jolly little darts? No. Spring fancies, love's young dream? Nonsense! Not even a quickening of the pulse? No. A sweet despair? Certainly not. A trembling hope? No. A frisson ? a Je ne sais quoi ? Nothing of the sort. Liar! said Grimes.

Now we shall both be alone, and I shall have no way of making you understand.' 'I don't want to make it easier for you,' I said; 'I hope your heart may break; but I do understand.

Soon someone would say the fatal words, Well, I think it's time for me to go to bed.

Her heart was broken perhaps, but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture. In a wider and grander way she felt things had been simplified.

The fortnight at Venice passed quickly and sweetly-- perhaps too sweetly; I was drowning in honey, stingless.

Of course those that have charm don't really need brains.

The vision fades, the soul sickens, and the routine of survival starts again.

Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.

She told me later that she had made a kind of note of me in her mind, as, scanning the shelf for a particular book, one will sometimes have one's attention caught by another, take it down, glance at the title page and saying I must read that, too, when I've the time, replace it and continue the search.

I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence.

Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.

He had no strength for any other war than his own solitary struggle to keep alive.

The worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. That is what it would mean; starting a life with you, without Him.

Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.

Sebastian is in love with his own childhood. That will make him very unhappy.

If a thing's worth doing at all, it's worth doing well.