Top 300 Evelyn Waugh Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “Ned”, he said, “there is one thing I must beg of you. Always wear a tall hat on Sundays during term. It is by that, more than anything, that a man is judged.”

— Evelyn Waugh

255. “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

256. “Who asked you to the funeral anyway? Were you acquainted with the late parrot?”

— Evelyn Waugh

257. “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

258. “Well, I do call that a lot of nonsense. I can understand a man wishing he hadn’t married and trying to get out of it – though I never felt anything of the kind myself – but to get rid of one wife and take up with another immediately, is beyond all reason.”

— Evelyn Waugh

259. “Now for the first time he was far from shore, submerged among deep waters, below wind and tide, where huge trees raised their spongy flowers and monstrous things without fur or feather, wing or foot, passed silently, in submarine twilight. A lush place.”

— Evelyn Waugh

260. “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

261. “Brideshead Revisited.”

— Evelyn Waugh

262. “I’m bound to say your Cardinal Hinsley did a wonderful job of work on the wireless. You could see he was an Englishman first and a Christian second; that is more than you can say of one or two of our bishops.”

— Evelyn Waugh

263. “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

264. “I had come to the surface, into the light of common day and the fresh sea-air, after long captivity in the sunless coral palaces and waving forests of the ocean bed. I had left behind me – what? Youth? Adolescence? Romance? The conjuring stuff of these things, ‘the Young Magician’s Compendium’, that neat cabinet where the ebony wand had its place besides the delusive billiard balls, the penny that folded double, and the feather flowers that could be drawn into a hollow candle.”

— Evelyn Waugh

265. “Whenever I see anything lovely nowadays – a building or a piece of scenery – I think to myself, ‘that’s by Charles.’ I see everything through his eyes. He is England to me.” I heard her say that; it was the sort of thing she had the habit of saying. Throughout our married life, again and again, I had felt my bowels shrivel within me at the things she said.”

— Evelyn Waugh

266. “Outside – and, in one or two places, inside – the rain fell in torrents.”

— Evelyn Waugh

267. “Ah well, to the journalist every country is rich.”

— Evelyn Waugh

268. “There should be a drug for soldiers, Guy thought, to put them to sleep until they were needed. They should repose among the briar like the knights of the Sleeping Beauty; they should be laid away in their boxes in the nursery cupboard. This unvarying cycle of excitement and disappointment rubbed them bare of paint and exposed the lead beneath.”

— Evelyn Waugh

269. “Summer passed; delirious crowds cheered Neville Chamberlain’s return from Munich;.”

— Evelyn Waugh

270. “I must visualize the scene, Apthorpe. When we are old men, memories of things like this will be our chief comfort.”

— Evelyn Waugh

271. “Most of my day is spent dealing with pathetic people of confused nationality seeking to escape the horrors of liberation.”

— Evelyn Waugh

272. “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

273. “Incidents of this kind constantly occurred when Basil was on a racket.”

— Evelyn Waugh

274. “After all, he reflected, his whole uniform was a disguise, his whole new calling a masquerade.”

— Evelyn Waugh

275. “The room was large and faultless. A psychologist, hired from Cambridge, had planned the decorations – magenta and gamboge; colors which – it had been demonstrated by experiments on poultry and mice – conduce to a mood of dignified gaiety. Every day carpet, curtains and upholstery were inspected for signs of disrepair. A gentle whining note filled the apartment, emanating from a plant which was thought to “condition” the atmosphere.”

— Evelyn Waugh

276. “All this I learned about Julia, bit by bit, from the stories she told, from guesswork, knowing her, from what her friends said, from the odd expressions she now and then let slip, from occasional dreamy monologues of reminiscences; I learnt it as one does learn the former – as it seems at the time, the preparatory – life of a woman one loves, so that one thinks of oneself as part of it, directing it by devious ways, towards oneself.”

— Evelyn Waugh

277. “Many were already on Lord Copper’s pay-roll and they thus found their working day prolonged by some three hours without recompense – with the forfeit, indeed, of the considerable expenses of dressing up, coming out at night, and missing the last train home; those who were normally the slaves of other masters were, Lord Copper felt, his for the evening.”

— Evelyn Waugh

278. “At a banquet given in his honour Sir Jocelyn Hitchcock once modestly attributed his success in life to the habit of “getting up earlier than the other fellow.” But this was partly metaphorical, partly false and in case wholly relative for journalists are as a rule late risers.”

— Evelyn Waugh

279. “The day before I would have said: ‘There aren’t two sides’; that day I said, ‘No, I’m with you.”

— Evelyn Waugh

280. “For Guy the news quickened the sickening suspicion he had tried to ignore, had succeeded in ignoring more often than not in his service in the Halberdiers; that he was engaged in a war in which courage and a just cause were quite irrelevant to the issue.”

— Evelyn Waugh

281. “The perfect leisure which those people alone enjoy who are untroubled by the speculative or artistic itch.”

— Evelyn Waugh

282. “Most English gentlemen at this time believed that they had a particular aptitude for endearing themselves to the lower classes.”

— Evelyn Waugh

283. “Here the girls danced together in the winter evenings to the music of the wireless and tender possessive friendships were contracted and repudiated;.”

— Evelyn Waugh

284. “Rex, in his early forties, had grown heavy and ruddy; he had lost his Canadian accent and acquired instead the hoarse, loud tone that was common to all his friends, as though their voices were perpetually strained to make themselves heard above a crowd, as though, with youth forsaking them, there was no time to wait the opportunity to speak, no time to listen, no time to reply; time for a laugh – a throaty mirthless laugh, the base currency of goodwill.”

— Evelyn Waugh

285. “They are looking for convicts, and as often as not they are rewarded by seeing move across the heath before them a black group of men chained together and uniformly dressed, with a mounted and armed.”

— Evelyn Waugh

286. “The doctor spoke dispassionately, almost brutally, with the relish men of science sometimes have for limiting themselves to inessentials, for pruning back their work to the point of sterility...”

— Evelyn Waugh

287. “And why wouldn’t I be seeing all that dough going on relations they’ve hated all their lives, while the pets who’ve loved them and stood by them, never asked no questions, never complained, rich or poor, sickness or health, get buried anyhow like they was just animals?”

— Evelyn Waugh

288. “I aches,” said Mrs. Jackson with simple dignity. “I aches terrible all round the sit-upon. It’s the damp.”

— Evelyn Waugh

289. “D’you know, Bridey, if I ever felt for a moment like becoming a Catholic, I should only have to talk to you for five minutes to be cured. You manage to reduce what seem quite sensible propositions to stark nonsense.” “It’s odd you should say that. I’ve heard it before from other people. It’s one of the many reasons why I don’t think I should make a good priest.”

— Evelyn Waugh

290. “If you live with a man you come to know the other woman he has loved.”

— Evelyn Waugh

291. “I expect you’ll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That’s what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour.”

— Evelyn Waugh

292. “Well, it’ll be a long war. There’ll be fun for us all in the end.”

— Evelyn Waugh

293. “One of the first discoveries of his captivity was that interest in ‘news’ does not spring from genuine curiosity, but from the desire for completeness. During this long years of freedom he had scarcely allowed a day to pass without reading fairly fully from at least two newspapers, always pressing on with the series of events which never came to an end. Once the series was broken he had little desire to resume it.”

— Evelyn Waugh

294. “From this task of ordered discrimination he had been thrown into the ruthless, cut-throat, rough-and-tumble of the Beast’s Woman’s Page.”

— Evelyn Waugh

295. “Wars don’t start nowadays because people want them. We long for peace, and fill our newspapers with conferences about disarmament and arbitration, but there is a radical instability in our whole world order, and soon we shall all be walking into the jaws of destruction again, protesting our pacific intentions.”

— Evelyn Waugh

296. “Dennis hesitated with his fingers on the handle and was aware of communication with another hand beyond the panels. Thus in a hundred novels had loves stood.”

— Evelyn Waugh

297. “England had declared war to defend the independence of Poland. Now that country had quite disappeared and the two strongest states in the world guaranteed her extinction.”

— Evelyn Waugh

298. “Here, in one of the smaller oval frames, I sketched a romantic landscape, and in the days that followed filled it out in colour, and, by luck and the happy mood of the moment, made a success of it. The brush seemed somehow to do what was wanted of it. It was a landscape without figures, a summer scene of white cloud and blue distances, with an ivy-clad ruin in the foreground, rocks and a waterfall affording a rugged introduction to the receding parkland behind.”

— Evelyn Waugh

299. “They’re featuring me as a special service.” “Then why do they want to send me?” “All the papers are sending specials.” “And all the papers have reports from three or four agencies?” “Yes.” “But if we all send the same thing it seems a waste.” “There would soon be a row if we did.” “But isn’t it very confusing if we all send different news?” “It gives them a choice. They all have different policies so of course they have to give different news.”

— Evelyn Waugh

300. “Premature examination of his files might ruin his private, undefined Plan. Somewhere in the ultimate curlicues of his mind, there was a Plan. Given time, given enough confidential material, he would succeed in knitting the entire quarrelsome world into a single net of conspiracy in which there were no antagonists, merely millions of men working, unknown to one another, for the same end; and there would be no more war.”

— Evelyn Waugh