431 Quotes by Evelyn Waugh

One forgets words as one forgets names. One’s vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.

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

Beware the Anglo-Catholics. They’re all sodomites with unpleasant accents.” – Cousin Jasper.

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.

Too late, old boy, too late. The saddest words in the English language.

I do not aspire to advise my sovereign in her choice of servants.

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.

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.

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.