Top 300 Evelyn Waugh Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 6 of 7

251. “Mi piacerebbe sotterrare qualcosa di prezioso in ogni posto dove sono stato felice e poi, una volta diventato vecchio brutto e povero, potrei sempre tornare a estrarlo e ricordare.”

— Evelyn Waugh

252. “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

253. “We look back already to the time of the persecution as though it were the heroic age, but have you ever thought how awfully few martyrs there were, compared with how many there ought to have been?”

— Evelyn Waugh

254. “Yes I am poor man. When I was very young I used often to be drunk. Now it is very seldom. Once or two times in the year. But always I do something I am very sorry for. I think perhaps I shall get drunk tonight,” he suggested, brightening.”

— Evelyn Waugh

255. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

258. “He was like a friend made on board ship, on the high seas; now we had come to his home port.”

— Evelyn Waugh

259. “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

260. “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

261. “Brideshead Revisited.”

— Evelyn Waugh

262. “And how was she deserved all this hate? She has done nothing except to be loved by someone who was not grown up... if you live with a man you come to know the other woman he has loved. I know Lady Marchmain very well. She is a good and simple woman who has been loved in the wrong way.”

— Evelyn Waugh

263. “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

264. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

266. “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

267. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

269. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

281. “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

282. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

284. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

287. “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

288. “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

289. “The European powers independently decided that they did not want that profitless piece of territory; that the one thing less desirable than seeing a neighbor established there, was the trouble of taking it themselves. Accordingly, by general consent, it was ruled off the maps and its immunity guaranteed. 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

290. “Under this liberal and progressive regime, the republic may be said, in some ways, to have prospered.”

— Evelyn Waugh

291. “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

292. “As a rule there is one thing you can always count on in our job – popularity. There are plenty of disadvantages I grant you, but you are liked and respected. Ring people up any hour of the day or night, butt into their houses uninvited make them answer a string of damn fool questions when they want to do something else – they like it. Always a smile and the best of everything for the gentlemen of the Press.”

— Evelyn Waugh

293. “Why must you see everything secondhand? Why must this be a play? Why must my conscience be a pre-Raphelite picture?”

— Evelyn Waugh

294. “If she apostatized now, having been brought up in the Church, she would go to hell, while the Protestant girls of her acquaintance, schooled in happy ignorance, could marry eldest sons, live at peace with their world, and get to heaven before her.”

— Evelyn Waugh

295. “The temptation for Guy, which he resisted as best he could, was to brood on his own bereavement and deplore the countless occasions of his life when he had failed his father. That was not what he was here for. There would be ample time in the years to come for these selfish considerations.”

— Evelyn Waugh

296. “What is a ‘canty day,’ Dennis?” “I’ve never troubled to ask. Something like Hogmanay, I expect.” “What is that?” “People being sick on the pavement in Glasgow.” “Oh.”

— Evelyn Waugh

297. “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

298. “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

299. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh