Evelyn Waugh Quotes

After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can't trust a person.

There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair.

It would be a dull world if we all thought alike.

You could appreciate the beauty of the world by trying to paint it.

I've always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. ... Or it may be a private bargain between me and God, that if I give up this one thing I want so much, however bad I am, He won't quite despair of me in the end.

No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can't really hate God either. When they want to Hate Him and His saints they have to find something like themselves and pretends it's God and hate that.

The worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. That is what it would mean; starting a life with you, without Him.

Julia to Charles

Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom.

Success in this world depends on knowing exactly how little effort each job is worth...distribution of energy...

Miss Runcible wore trousers and Miles touched up his eye-lashes in the dining-room of the hotel where they stopped for luncheon. So they were asked to leave.

Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist.

We,Seth, Emperor of Azania, Chief of the Chiefs of Sakuyu, Lord of Wanda and Tyrant of the Seas, Bachelor of the Arts of Oxford University, being in this the twenty-fourth year of our life, summoned by the wisdom of Almighty God and the unanimous voice of our people to the throne of our ancestors, do hereby proclaim ...

Despite their promises at the last Election, the politicians had not yet changed the climate.

All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day.

It (modernization) is just another jungle closing in.

This war has begun in darkness and it will end in silence.

Here my last love had died.

If she looked further than the wedding, it was to see marriage as the beginning of individual existence, this skirmish from which one one's spurs, from which one set out on the true quests of life.

Not for her the cruel, delicate luxury of choice, the indolent, cat-and-mouse pastimes of the hearth-rug. No Penelope she; she must hunt in the forest.

Yes, I was determined to have a happy Christmas' 'Did you?' 'I think so. I don't remember it much, and that's always a good sign, isn't it?