It 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.
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.
EVELYN WAUGHI think it’s one of the kindest things you can do to the very wicked, to give them time to repent.
EVELYN WAUGHPerhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.
EVELYN WAUGHI 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 WAUGHI regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed.
EVELYN WAUGHI think there’s almost nothing I can’t excuse except perhaps worshiping graven images. That seems to be idiotic.
EVELYN WAUGHThe 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.
EVELYN WAUGHManners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.
EVELYN WAUGHWhere can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?
EVELYN WAUGHAlmost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.
EVELYN WAUGHIf 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.
EVELYN WAUGHIt is a curious thing. That every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.
EVELYN WAUGHWords should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker.
EVELYN WAUGHRemember 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 WAUGHHe had no strength for any other war than his own solitary struggle to keep alive.
EVELYN WAUGHDon’t hold your parents up to contempt. After all, you are their son, and it is just possible that you may take after them.
EVELYN WAUGH