My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.
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.
More Evelyn Waugh Quotes
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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 -
There is something incomparably thrilling in first opening a brand new book.
EVELYN WAUGH -
I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I’m old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.
EVELYN WAUGH -
All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I’d sooner go to my dentist any day.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Aesthetic value is often the by-product of the artist striving to do something else.
EVELYN WAUGH -
The great charm in argument is really finding one’s own opinions, not other people’s.
EVELYN WAUGH -
A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.
EVELYN WAUGH -
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 -
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 -
Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker.
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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 -
We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them…
EVELYN WAUGH -
The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.
EVELYN WAUGH