431 Quotes by Evelyn Waugh

But is there a difference between liking a thing and thinking it good?

You’ll find you spend half your second year shaking off the undesirable friends you made in your first...

He seems to be in a very bad temper.” “Not really. He’s always like that to waiters. You see he’s a communist. Most of the staff of The Twopence are – they’re University men, you see. Pappenhacker says that every time you are polite to a proletarian you are helping to bolster up the capitalist system. He’s very clever of course, but he gets rather unpopular.

He was talking very excitedly to me,” said the Vicar, “about some apparatus for warming a church in Worthing and about the Apostolic Claims of the Church of Abyssinia. I confess I could not follow him clearly. He seems deeply interested in Church matters. Are you quite sure he is right in the head? I have noticed again and again since I have been in the Church that lay interest in ecclesiastical matters is often a prelude to insanity.

I remember no syllable of them now, but the other, more ancient lore which I acquired that term will be with me in one shape or another to my last hour. “I like this bad set and I like getting drunk at luncheon”; that was enough then. Is more needed now?

That’s the public-school system all over. They may kick you out, but they never let you down.

When people hate with all that energy, it is something in themselves they are hating. Alex is hating all the illusions of boyhood – innocence, God, hope. Poor Lady Marchmain has to bear all that. He loved me for a time, quite a short time, as a man loves his own strength; it is simpler for a woman; she has not all these ways of loving. Now Alex is very fond of me and I protect him from his own innocence.

Never get mixed up in a Welsh wrangle. It doesn’t end in blows like an Irish one, but goes on forever.

It was a morning of ethereal splendor – such a morning as Noah knew as he gazed from his pitchy bulwarks over limitless, sunlit waters while the dove circled and mounted and became lost in the shining heavens; such a morning as only the angels saw on the first day of that rash cosmic experiment that had resulted, at the moment, in landing Corker and Pigge here in the mud, stiff and unshaven and disconsolate.