Top 300 Evelyn Waugh Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “I don’t know what it means, but I didn’t mean it.”

— Evelyn Waugh

252. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

259. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

262. “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

263. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

265. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “I do not seek to scrape acquaintance with Lady Celia; I do not want my photograph in the Tatler, I have not come to exhibit myself.”

— Evelyn Waugh

271. “Lady Marchmain,10 no I am not on her side; but God is, who suffers fools gladly;.”

— Evelyn Waugh

272. “He did not fail in love, but his lost his joy of it, for I was no longer part of his solitude. 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

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

277. “My sister Cordelia’s last report said that she was not only the worst girl in the school, but the worst there had ever been in the memory of the oldest nun.”

— Evelyn Waugh

278. “The just censure of society is accorded to those so inconstant and intemperate that they must take their pleasures in the unholy market of humanity that still sullies the fame of our civilization; but for the traders themselves, these human vampires who prey upon the degradation of their species, society has reserved the right of ruthless suppression.”

— Evelyn Waugh

279. “When it was done, Guy studied himself once more in the glass and recognized an old acquaintance he could never cut, to whom he could never hope to give the slip for long, the uncongenial fellow traveler who would accompany him through life.”

— Evelyn Waugh

280. “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

281. “They were so busy in those weeks with their own homebuilding, repairing, rearranging, improvising, that the great storm that was shaking the world passed overhead unnoticed until the crash of a bough set all the hidden roots again vibrating.”

— Evelyn Waugh

282. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

284. “Algernon Stitch was standing in the hall; his bowler hat was on his head; his right hand, grasping a crimson, royally emblazoned dispatch case, emerged from the left sleeve of his overcoat; his other hand burrowed petulantly in his breast pocket. An umbrella under his left arm further inconvenienced him. He spoke indistinctly, for he was holding a folded copy of the morning paper between his teeth. “Can’t get it on,” he seemed to say.”

— Evelyn Waugh

285. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

292. “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

293. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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

— Evelyn Waugh

296. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh

298. “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

299. “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

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

— Evelyn Waugh