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I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.

Evelyn Waugh

I’m one of the blind alleys off the main road of procreation.
EVELYN WAUGH

Blind Myself Road
I can’t bare you when you’re not amusing.
EVELYN WAUGH

Amusement Myself Personality Yourself
The only thing that it is advisable to know in any language is the numerals; and even there, you can do a lot with the fingers.
EVELYN WAUGH

Advice Fingers Language Yourself
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.
EVELYN WAUGH

Answer Desire Desperate Emotion Hate Identity Love Name Philosophy Yourself
Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.
EVELYN WAUGH

Boredom One Liner Punctuality Time Virtue
Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.
EVELYN WAUGH

Character Let Go Mischief Need Yourself
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 WAUGH

Easy Innocence Oneself Youth
I put the words down and push them a bit.
EVELYN WAUGH

Myself Voice Word
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

Bed Myself Need Rest Sleep Work
A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.
EVELYN WAUGH

Modern Remove Science
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.
EVELYN WAUGH

Appearance Enough Heaven Human Invention Mindset
What is youth except a man or a woman before it is ready or fit to be seen.
EVELYN WAUGH

Exception See Woman Youth
They are a very decent generous lot of people out here and they don’t expect you to listen. It’s the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard.
EVELYN WAUGH

Country Design Expectation Generosity Happiness Listening People Secret Talk
If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be.
EVELYN WAUGH

Happiness Politics Science
I think there’s almost nothing I can’t excuse except perhaps worshiping graven images. That seems to be idiotic.
EVELYN WAUGH

Excuse Image Myself Stupidity Thinking Worship
Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.
EVELYN WAUGH

Action Alone Determination Worth Yourself
Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.
EVELYN WAUGH

Art Crime Design Desire Expression
The great charm in argument is really finding one’s own opinions, not other people’s.
EVELYN WAUGH

Argument Greatness Opinion People
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

Live Myself Popular Reading Truth Wrong
If a thing’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing well.
EVELYN WAUGH

Work Worth
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

Character Food Soft Warm
We possess nothing certainly except the past.
EVELYN WAUGH

Exception One Liner Past Possession
Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them.
EVELYN WAUGH

Conversation Goodness Missing Yourself
You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.
EVELYN WAUGH

Hard Human Ideas Myself Power Religious
I don’t believe that people would ever fall in love or want to be married if they hadn’t been told about it. It’s like abroad: no one would want to go there if they hadn’t been told it existed.
EVELYN WAUGH

Believe Existence Fall Love Marriage Myself People
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

Adult Best Boredom Education Hope Language Life Patience Perfection Remember Study Yourself
O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin.
EVELYN WAUGH

Forgiveness God Philosophy Religious Sin

I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.

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I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.

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