Evelyn Waugh Quotes
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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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There is a species of person called a 'Modern Churchman' who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief.
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To understand all is to forgive all.
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The tour bus was supposed to be here ten minutes ago. Would it be possible to give them a ring to check they've not forgotten us?
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Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums who find prison so soul-destroying.
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The truth is that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up.
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Enclosing every thin man, there's a fat man demanding elbow-room.
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You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.
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Free as air; that's what they say- "free as air". Now they bring me my air in an iron barrel.
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Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?
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If a thing's worth doing at all, it's worth doing well.
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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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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.
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"It is typical of Oxford," I said, "to start the new year in autumn."
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He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending to be whole.
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Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.
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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.
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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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I can't bare you when you're not amusing.
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Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and the plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them. But when dear Sebastian speaks it is like a little sphere of soapsud drifting off the end of an old clay pipe, anywhere, full of rainbow light for a second and then - phut! vanished, with nothing left at all, nothing.
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The Welsh are the only nation in the world that has produced no graphic or plastic art, no architecture, no drama. They just sing. Sing and blow down wind instruments of plated silver.
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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.
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The tourist debauches the great monuments of antiquity, a comic figure, always inapt in his comments, incongruous in his appearance; ...avarice and deceit attack him at every step; the shops that he patronizes are full of forgeries... But we need feel no scruple or twinge of uncertainty; 'we' are travelers and cosmopolitans; the tourist is the other fellow.
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The most futile and disastrous day seems well spent when it is reviewed through the blue, fragrant smoke of a Havana Cigar.
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She had heard someone say something about an Independent Labour Party, and was furious that she had not been asked.
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'I will not stand for being called a woman in my own house' she said.
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Once you start changing a name, you see, there's no reason ever to stop. One always hears one that sounds better.
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...she had regained what I thought she had lost forever, the magical sadness which had drawn me to her, the thwarted look that had seemed to say, "Surely I was made for some other purpose than this?
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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.
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I have a good mind not to take Aloysius to Venice. I don't want him to meet a lot of horrid Italian bears and pick up bad habits.
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