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 WAUGHRemember 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.
More Evelyn Waugh Quotes
-
-
Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?
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 -
We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them…
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 -
I put the words down and push them a bit.
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 -
Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.
EVELYN WAUGH -
A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.
EVELYN WAUGH -
A work of art is not a matter of thinking beautiful thoughts or experiencing tender emotions , but of intelligence, skill, taste, proportion, knowledge, discipline and industry; especially discipline.
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 -
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 -
It is a curious thing. That every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.
EVELYN WAUGH -
Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.
EVELYN WAUGH -
There’s only one great evil in the world today. Despair.
EVELYN WAUGH -
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