Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?
EVELYN WAUGHIt is easy, retrospectively, to endow one’s youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one’s stature on the edge of the door.
More Evelyn Waugh Quotes
-
-
News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Its a rather pleasant change when all your life you’ve had people looking after you, to have someone to look after yourself. Only of course it has to be someone pretty hopeless to need looking after by me.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now.
EVELYN WAUGH -
He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.
EVELYN WAUGH -
The great charm in argument is really finding one’s own opinions, not other people’s.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Port is not for the very young, the vain and the active. It is the comfort of age and the companion of the scholar and the philosopher.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Of the many smells of Athens two seem to me the most characteristic – that of garlic, bold and deadly like acetylene gas. and that of dust, soft and warm and caressing like tweed.
EVELYN WAUGH -
If a thing’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing well.
EVELYN WAUGH -
What is youth except a man or a woman before it is ready or fit to be seen.
EVELYN WAUGH -
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.
EVELYN WAUGH -
It is a curious thing. That every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.
EVELYN WAUGH -
I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live but I am told that this is a common experience.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Enclosing every thin man, there’s a fat man demanding elbow-room.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Once you start changing a name, you see, there’s no reason ever to stop. One always hears one that sounds better.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Money is only useful when you get rid of it. It is like the odd card in ‘Old Maid’; the player who is finally left with it has lost.
EVELYN WAUGH -
I haven’t been to sleep for over a year. That’s why I go to bed early. One needs more rest if one doesn’t sleep.
EVELYN WAUGH -
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.
EVELYN WAUGH -
A work of art is not a matter of thinking beautiful thoughts or experiencing tender emotions , but of intelligence, skill, taste, proportion, knowledge, discipline and industry; especially discipline.
EVELYN WAUGH -
One forgets words as one forgets names. One’s vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Remember that, however patient your study, you will never in adult life learn any language perfectly; the best you can hope for is to be a bore.
EVELYN WAUGH -
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.
EVELYN WAUGH -
For in that city -New York; there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.
EVELYN WAUGH -
I read the newspapers with lively interest. It is seldom that they are absolutely, point-blank wrong. That is the popular belief, but those who are in the know can usually discern an embryo of truth, a little grit of fact, like the core of a pearl, round which have been deposited the delicate layers of ornament.
EVELYN WAUGH -
There’s only one great evil in the world today. Despair.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.
EVELYN WAUGH