Quotes About Evelyn Waugh

The Catholic Church with its foreshortened American history and tangled puritanical roots was as inviolate to my mother and father as it was to the last-ditch aristocrats of Evelyn Waugh.

Evelyn Waugh proposed that the conclusion of the book affirms the mystery that 'no one knows the secrets of the human heart or the nature of God's mercy'.

All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day.

she had regained what I thought she had lost forever, the magical sadness which had drawn me to her, the thwarted look that had seemed to say, Surely I was made for some other purpose than this?

Have you at any time been detained in a mental home or similar institution? If so, give particulars.' 'I was at Scone College, Oxford, for two years,' said Paul.

The anguished suspense of watching the lips you hunger for, framing the words, the death sentence, of sheer triteness!

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.

the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one gray morning of war-time.

Above all the babble of her age and ours, she makes one blunt assertion. And there alone lies Hope.

My sister Cordelia's last report said that she was not only the worst girl in the school, but the worst there had ever been in the memory of the oldest nun.

You must see the garden front and the fountain. He leaned forward and put the car into gear. It's where my family live. And even then, rapt in the vision, I felt, momentarily, like a wind stirring the tapestry, an ominous chill at the words he used--not That is my home, but It's where my family live.

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

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

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 ...

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

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

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.

I'm bound to say your Cardinal Hinsley did a wonderful job of work on the wireless. You could see he was an Englishman first and a Christian second; that is more than you can say of one or two of our bishops.

you seem to find everything banal. it's a new word whose correct use i have only lately learnt,' said josephine with dignity. 'i find it applies to nearly everything.

[Graham Greenes] ability to encapsulate the essence of an exotic setting in a single book is exemplified in The Heart of the Matter (1948); his contemporary Evelyn Waugh stated that the West Africa of that book replaced the true remembered West Africa of his own experience.

Have you at any time been detained in a mental home or similar institution? If so, give particulars.' 'I was at Scone College, Oxford, for two years,' said Paul.

It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it is based.

My go-to author for knowing it all is Evelyn Waugh. 'A Handful of Dust' is as perfect as a book can get.