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 WAUGHO God, make me good, but not yet.
More Evelyn Waugh Quotes
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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 -
He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.
EVELYN WAUGH -
I can’t bare you when you’re not amusing.
EVELYN WAUGH -
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 -
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 -
One forgets words as one forgets names. One’s vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Its a rather pleasant change when all your life you’ve had people looking after you, to have someone to look after yourself. Only of course it has to be someone pretty hopeless to need looking after by me.
EVELYN WAUGH -
It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it is based.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.
EVELYN WAUGH -
To understand all is to forgive all.
EVELYN WAUGH -
I think there’s almost nothing I can’t excuse except perhaps worshiping graven images. That seems to be idiotic.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.
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 -
Once you start changing a name, you see, there’s no reason ever to stop. One always hears one that sounds better.
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 -
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 -
Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.
EVELYN WAUGH -
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 -
What is youth except a man or a woman before it is ready or fit to be seen.
EVELYN WAUGH -
After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can’t trust a person.
EVELYN WAUGH -
All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I’d sooner go to my dentist any day.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.
EVELYN WAUGH -
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 -
Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker.
EVELYN WAUGH -
To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.
EVELYN WAUGH