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 WAUGHIf a thing’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing well.
More Evelyn Waugh Quotes
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Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.
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An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.
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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 -
The splendid thing about education is that everyone wants it. Like influenza, you can give it away without losing any of it yourself.
EVELYN WAUGH -
A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.
EVELYN WAUGH -
After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can’t trust a person.
EVELYN WAUGH -
There is something incomparably thrilling in first opening a brand new book.
EVELYN WAUGH -
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 -
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.
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Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?
EVELYN WAUGH -
Here I am,’ I thought, ‘back from the jungle, back from the ruins. Here, where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.
EVELYN WAUGH -
News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read.
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Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.
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Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.
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 -
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 -
Anyone could write a novel given six weeks, pen paper, and no telephone or wife.
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Don’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 -
O God, make me good, but not yet.
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I think there’s almost nothing I can’t excuse except perhaps worshiping graven images. That seems to be idiotic.
EVELYN WAUGH -
What is youth except a man or a woman before it is ready or fit to be seen.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Enclosing every thin man, there’s a fat man demanding elbow-room.
EVELYN WAUGH -
We possess nothing certainly except the past.
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I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed.
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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