One forgets words as one forgets names. One’s vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.
EVELYN WAUGHWords have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.
More Evelyn Waugh Quotes
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What is youth except a man or a woman before it is ready or fit to be seen.
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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.
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After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can’t trust a person.
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Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?
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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.
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Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.
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Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist.
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The great charm in argument is really finding one’s own opinions, not other people’s.
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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.
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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.
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Anyone could write a novel given six weeks, pen paper, and no telephone or wife.
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Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker.
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I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.
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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.
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News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read.
EVELYN WAUGH