Top 300 Evelyn Waugh Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “Ought we to be drunk every night?” Sebastian asked one morning. “Yes, I think so.” “I think so too.”

— Evelyn Waugh

205. “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

206. “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

207. “This, I did not need telling, was Anthony Blanche, the “aesthete” par excellence, a byword of iniquity from Cherwell Edge to Somerville.”

— Evelyn Waugh

208. “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

209. “The problem of architecture as I see it is the problem of all art – the elimination of the human element from the consideration of the form.”

— Evelyn Waugh

210. “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

211. “I know I am awful. But how much more awful I should be without the Faith.”

— Evelyn Waugh

212. “I distinctly remember last Christmas seeing you together and thinking how happy you looked, and wondering why. You’ll find it very disturbing, you know, starting off again. How old are you – thirty-four? That’s no age to be starting.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

214. “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

215. “I never can understand how two men can write a book together; to me that’s like three people getting together to have a baby.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

217. “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

218. “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

219. “But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into the depths of confusion you didn’t know existed.”

— Evelyn Waugh

220. “It was during that term that I began to realise that Sebastian was a drunkard in quite a different sense to myself. I got drunk often, but through an excess of high spirits, in the love of the moment, and the wish to prolong and enchant it; Sebastian drank to escape.”

— Evelyn Waugh

221. “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

222. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

224. “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

225. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

230. “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

231. “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

232. “The languor of Youth – how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrevocably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth – all save this – come and go with us through life.”

— Evelyn Waugh

233. “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

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

237. “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

238. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

241. “I am sorry to disturb you,′ said James politely, ’but these people wished to shoot us.”

— Evelyn Waugh

242. “To Father Rothschild no passage was worse than any other. He thought of the sufferings of the saints, the mutability of human nature, the Four Last Things, and between whiles repeated snatches of the penitential psalms.”

— Evelyn Waugh

243. “How could I have known? There seemed time for everything in those days; the world was open to be explored at leisure.”

— Evelyn Waugh

244. “These men must die to make a world for Hooper; they were the aborigines, vermin by right of law, to be shot at leisure so that things might be safe for the travelling salesmen.”

— Evelyn Waugh

245. “The effects of their drinks had now entered on that secondary stage, vividly described in temperance handbooks, when the momentary illusion of well-being and exhilaration gives place to melancholy, indigestion and moral decay.”

— Evelyn Waugh

246. “The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms. Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle.” This was the belief of Guy Crouchback in 1939 when he heard the news of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty. What follows is the story of his attempt to find his “place in that battle.”

— Evelyn Waugh

247. “You must see the garden front and the fountain.” He leaned forward and put the car into gear. “It’s where my family live.” And even then, rapt in the vision, I felt, momentarily, like a wind stirring the tapestry, an ominous chill at the words he used – not “That is my home,” but “It’s where my family live.”

— Evelyn Waugh

248. “There’s nothing wrong in being a physical wreck, you know. There’s no moral obligation to be Postmaster-General or Master of Foxhounds or to live to walk ten miles at eighty.”

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— 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