Top 300 Evelyn Waugh Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Virginia’s son was born on June 4th, the day on which all allied armies entered Rome.”

— Evelyn Waugh

202. “My father greeted me with his usual air of mild regret.”

— Evelyn Waugh

203. “I’ve just been to Greece to see the buildings there,′ said Professor Silenus. ‘Did you like them?’ ‘They are unspeakably ugly. But there were some nice goats.”

— Evelyn Waugh

204. “That day was the beginning of my friendship with Sebastian, and thus it came about, that morning in June, that I was lying beside him in the shade of the high elms watching the smoke from his lips drift up into the branches.”

— Evelyn Waugh

205. “Beerbohm was a genius of the purest kind. He stands at the summit of his art.”

— Evelyn Waugh

206. “Every attendance at Mass leaves me without comfort or edification. I shall never, pray God, apostatize but church-going is now a bitter trial.”

— Evelyn Waugh

207. “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?”

— Evelyn Waugh

208. “It is a curious thing... that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.”

— Evelyn Waugh

209. “He was talking very excitedly to me,” said the Vicar, “about some apparatus for warming a church in Worthing and about the Apostolic Claims of the Church of Abyssinia. I confess I could not follow him clearly. He seems deeply interested in Church matters. Are you quite sure he is right in the head? I have noticed again and again since I have been in the Church that lay interest in ecclesiastical matters is often a prelude to insanity.”

— Evelyn Waugh

210. “The next four weeks of solitary confinement were among the happiest of Paul’s life... It was so exhilarating, he found, never to have to make any decision on any subject, to be wholly relieved from the smallest consideration of time, meas, or clothes, to have no anxiety ever about what kind of impression he was making; in fact, to be free.”

— Evelyn Waugh

211. “Frankly,” said the Doctor, “I am at a loss to understand my own emotions. I can think of no entertainment that fills me with greater detestation than a display of competitive athletics, none – except possibly folk dancing.”

— Evelyn Waugh

212. “He delighted in writing, in the joinery and embellishment of his sentences, in the consciousness of high rare virtue when every word had been used in its purest and most precise sense, in the kitten games of syntax and rhetoric. Words could do anything except generate their own meaning.”

— Evelyn Waugh

213. “Thus strategists hesitate over the map, the few pins and lines of coloured chalk, contemplating a change in the pins and lines, a matter of inches, which outside the room, out of sight of the studious officers, may engulf the past, present and future in ruin or life. She was a symbol to herself then, lacking the life of both child and woman; victory and defeat were changes of pin and line; she knew nothing of war.”

— Evelyn Waugh

214. “She was daily surprised by the things he knew and the things he did not know; both, at the time, added to his attraction.”

— Evelyn Waugh

215. “The two drinks were brought in, poured out already in the glasses, like ‘doubles’ at a bar, and all our eyes followed the tray, as though we were dogs in a dining-room smelling game.”

— Evelyn Waugh

216. “But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can’t shut myself from His mercy. That is what it would mean; starting a life with you, without Him. One can only hope to see one step ahead. But I saw today there was one thing unforgivable – like things in the schoolroom, so bad they are unpunishable, that only Mummy could deal with – the bad thing I was on the point of doing, that I’m not quite bad enough to do; to set up a rival good to God’s.”

— Evelyn Waugh

217. “As my intimacy with his family grew, I became part of the world which he sought to escape; I became one of the bonds which held him.”

— Evelyn Waugh

218. “There was a regulation that if they remained at large in enemy territory for some weeks longer, they could be repatriated to the United States. It was for this that they had made a hazardous parachute jump and destroyed an expensive, very slightly damaged aeroplane.”

— Evelyn Waugh

219. “Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom.”

— Evelyn Waugh

220. “But the wood has endured. In splinters and shavings, gorgeously encased, it has traveled the world over and found a joyous welcome among every race. For it states a fact. Hounds are checked, hunting wild. A horn calls clear through the covert. Helena casts them back on the scent. Above all the babble of her age and ours, she makes one blunt assertion. And there alone lies Hope.”

— Evelyn Waugh

221. “I rejoiced in the Burgundy. It seemed a reminder that the world was an older and better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his.”

— Evelyn Waugh

222. “Money is only useful when you get rid of it. It is like the odd card in Old Maid; the player who is finally with it has lost.”

— Evelyn Waugh

223. “Edith and Olive and me have talked it over and we want to go and make aeroplanes.”

— Evelyn Waugh

224. “I’ve always had two principles throughout all my life in motion-pictures: never do before the camera what you would not do at home and never do at home what you would not do before the camera.”

— Evelyn Waugh

225. “He had no strength for any other war than his own solitary struggle to keep alive.”

— Evelyn Waugh

226. “There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.”

— Evelyn Waugh

227. “Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases.”

— Evelyn Waugh

228. “Instruction would be wasted on me. Just to give me the form and I’ll sign on the dotted line.”

— Evelyn Waugh

229. “It was his misfortune to be respected as a writer by almost everyone except those with whom he most consorted.”

— Evelyn Waugh

230. “MGM bores me when I see them, but I don’t see them much. They have been a help in getting me introductions to morticians, who are the only people worth knowing.”

— Evelyn Waugh

231. “Next morning at first light to Guy’s surprise the troopship at last emerged from the haze of myth and was seen to be solidly at anchor beyond the mouth of the harbor.”

— Evelyn Waugh

232. “Most English gentlemen at this time believed that they had a particular aptitude for endearing themselves to the lower classes. Guy was not troubled by this illusion, but he believed he was rather liked by these particular thirty men. He did not greatly care.”

— Evelyn Waugh

233. “As there was no form of government common to the peoples thus segregated, nor tie of language, history, habit or belief, they were called a Republic.”

— Evelyn Waugh

234. “There are two distinct kinds of meanness – those which come of loving money and of disliking it. Mine was the latter sort.”

— Evelyn Waugh

235. “In the week which preceded the outbreak of the Second World War – days of surmise and apprehension which cannot, without irony, be called the last days of peace – and on the Sunday morning when all doubts were finally resolved and misconceptions corrected, three rich women thought first and mainly of Basil Seal.”

— Evelyn Waugh

236. “I don’t know what it means, but I didn’t mean it.”

— Evelyn Waugh

237. “He was not at all what is called ‘a character’. He was an innocent, affable old man who had somehow preserved his good humor – much more than that, a mysterious and tranquil joy – throughout a life which to all outward observation had been overloaded with misfortune. He had like many another been born in full sunlight and lived to see night fall.”

— Evelyn Waugh

238. “As ants, so soldiers. In the years to come he was to see the process at work again and again, sometimes in grim circumstances, sometimes in pleasant domesticity. Men unnaturally removed from wives and family began at once to build substitute homes, to paint and furnish, to make flower-beds and edge them with white-washed pebbles, to stitch cushion-covers on lonely gun-sites.”

— Evelyn Waugh

239. “The way ran zigzag through a forest of pine which the bitter wind, still that morning, had turned to ice; every bough was adorned with lines of stalactite which shivered and glittered in the morning sun; every needle had a brilliant, vitreous case and when she flicked her whip at a wayside shrub she brought down a tinkling shower of ice-leaves, each the veined impression of its crisp, green counterpart.”

— Evelyn Waugh

240. “There was a change in both of us. We had lost a sense of discovery which had infused the anarchy of our first year.”

— Evelyn Waugh

241. “It was a small tortoise with Julia’s initials set in diamonds in the living shell, and this slightly obscene object, now slipping impotently on the polished boards, now striding across the card-table, now lumbering over a rug, now withdrawn at a touch, now stretching its neck and swaying its withered, antediluvian head, became a memorable part of the evening, one of those needlehooks of experience which catch the attention when larger matters are at stake.”

— Evelyn Waugh

242. “Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches.”

— Evelyn Waugh

243. “Here my last love died. There was nothing remarkable in the manner of its death.”

— Evelyn Waugh

244. “I always maintain a certain privacy on the sea. One so easily forms acquaintances which become tedious later.”

— Evelyn Waugh

245. “I returned to London in the spring of 1926 for the General Strike. It was the topic of Paris. The French, exultant as always at the discomfiture of their former friends, and transposing into their own precise terms our mistier notions from across the Channel, foretold revolution and civil.”

— Evelyn Waugh

246. “It was as though a deed of conveyance of her narrow loins had been drawn and sealed. I was making my first entry as the freeholder of a property I would enjoy and develop at leisure.”

— Evelyn Waugh

247. “One can have no idea what the suffering may be, to be maimed as he is – no dignity, no power of will. No one is ever holy without suffering. It’s taken that form with him... I’ve seen so much suffering in the last few years; there’s so much coming for everybody soon. It’s the spring of love...”

— Evelyn Waugh

248. “Guy left the office unashamed. He felt shaken, as though he had seen a road accident in which he was not concerned. His fingers shook but it was nerves not conscience which troubled him; he was familiar with shame; this trembling, hopeless sense of disaster was something of quite another order; something that would pass and leave no mark.”

— Evelyn Waugh

249. “It’s very banal, isn’t it, Boot?” “I like it very much.” “Do you? I think all Arthur’s work is banal. I read your book Waste of Time.” “Ah.” John did not invite criticism. “I thought it very banal.” “You seem to find everything banal.” “It is a new word whose correct use I have only lately learned,” said Josephine with dignity. “I find it applies to nearly everything; Virgil and Miss Brittling and my gymnasium.”

— Evelyn Waugh

250. “There’s a blessed equity in the English social system,’ said Grimes, ’that ensures the public school man against starvation. One goes through four or five years of perfect hell at an age when life is bound to be hell anyway, and after that the social system never lets one down.”

— Evelyn Waugh