Evelyn Waugh

“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.”

“The languor of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost!”

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

“Up to a point, Lord Copper.”

“The next four weeks of solitary confinement were among the happiest of Paul's life...It was so exhilarating, he found, never to have to make any decision on any subject, to be wholly relieved from the smallest consideration of time, meas, or clothes, to have no anxiety ever about what kind of impression he was making; in fact, to be free.”

“If only people realized Corbusier is pure nineteenth century, Manchester school utilitarian, and that's why they like him.”

“Of course those that have charm don't really need brains.”

“What is adolescence without trash?”

“Aunt Fanny tells me you made great friends with Mr. Mottram. I'm sure he can't be very nice.''I don't think he is,' said Julia. 'I don't know that I like nice people”

“it's a great thing in life to have a place you can't be moved from - too few of them”

“I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence.”

“Her heart was broken perhaps, but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture. In a wider and grander way she felt things had been simplified.”

“I took you out to dinner to warn you of charm. I warned you expressly and in great detail of the Flyte family. Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, Charles, it has killed you.' [Anthony Blanche to Charles Ryder]”

“Now we shall both be alone, and I shall have no way of making you understand.''I don't want to make it easier for you,' I said; 'I hope your heart may break; but I do understand.”

“The avalanche was down, the hillside swept bare behind it; the last echoes died on the white slopes; the new mount glittered and lay still in the silent valley.”

“I said to the doctor, who was with us daily. 'He's got a wonderful will to live, hasn't he?''Would you put it like that? I should say a great fear of death.''Is there a difference?''Oh dear, yes. He doesn't derive any strength from his fear, you know. It's wearing him out.”

“Even on that convivial evening I could feel my host emanating little magnetic waves of social uneasiness, creating, rather, a pool of general embarrassment about himself in which he floated with log-like calm.”

“I knew what she meant, and in that moment felt as though I had shaken off some of the dust and grit of ten dry years; then and always, however she spoke to me, in half sentences, single words, stock phrases of contemporary jargon, in scarcely perceptible movements of eyes or lips or hands, however inexpressible her thought, however quick and far it had glanced from the matter in hand, however deep it had plunged, as it often did, straight from the surface to the depths, I knew; even that day when I still stood on the extreme verge of love, I knew what she meant.”

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

“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.”

“There could be no eldest son for her, and younger sons were indelicate things, necessary, but not to be much spoken of. Younger sons had none of the privileges of obscurity; it was their plain duty to remain hidden until some disaster perchance promoted them to their brother's places, and, since this was their function, it was desirable that they should keep themselves wholly suitable for succession.”

“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?”

“..perhaps all our lovers are merely hints and symbols; vagabond languages scrawled on gate-posts and paving stones along the weary road that others have trampled before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond each other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.”

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

“So through a world of piety I made my way to Sebastian.”

“Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.'--William Boot”

“I'll pray for you.""That's very kind of you.""I can't spare you a whole rosary, you know. Just a decade. I've got such a long list of people. I take them in order and they get a decade about once a week.”

“Literature is the right use of language irrespective of the subject or reason of utterance.”

“News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read.”

“The fortnight at Venice passed quickly and sweetly-- perhaps too sweetly; I was drowning in honey, stingless.”

“That day was the beginning of my friendship with Sebastian, and thus it came about, that morning in June, that I was lying beside him in the shade of the high elms watching the smoke from his lips drift up into the branches.”

“It doesn't matter what people call you unless they call you pigeon pie and eat you up.”

“No one will write books once they reach heaven, but there is an excellent library, containing all the books written up to date, including all the lost books and the ones that the authors burned when they came back from the last publisher.”

“I used to know Brian Howard well -- a dazzling young man to my innocent eyes. In later life he became very dangerous -- constantly attacking people with his fists in public places -- so I kept clear of him. He was consumptive but the immediate cause of his death was a broken heart.”

“At night his most frequent recurring dream was of doing The Times crossword puzzle; his most disagreeable that he was reading a tedious book aloud to his family.”

“Rex has never been unkind to me intentionally. It's just that he isn't a real person at all; he's just a few faculties of a man highly developed; the rest simply isn't there.”

“Cordelia: I hope I've got a vocation.Charles: I don't know what that means.Cordelia: It means you can be a nun. If you haven't a vocation it's no good however much you want to be; and if you have a vocation, you can't get away from it, however much you hate it.”

“My dear, I could hardly keep still in my chair. I wanted to dash out of the house and leap in a taxi and say, "Take me to Charles's unhealthy pictures." Well, I went, but the gallery after luncheon was so full of absurd women in the sort of hats they should be made to eat, that I rested a little--I rested here with Cyril and Tom and these saucy boys. Then I came back at the unfashionable time of five o'clock, all agog, my dear; and what did I find? I found, my dear, a very naughty and very successful practical joke. It reminded me of dear Sebastian when he liked so much to dress up in false whiskers. It was charm again, my dear, simple, creamy English charm, playing tigers.”

“At the door fo the dining-room he left us. 'Good night, Mr Jorkins,' he said. 'I hope you will pay us another visit when you next "cross the herring pond".' 'I say, what did your governor mean by that? He seemed almost to think I was American.' 'He's rather odd at times.”

“If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be.”

“We could watch the madmen, on clement days, sauntering and skipping among the trim gravel walks and pleasantly planted lawns; happy collaborationists who had given up the unequal struggle, all doubts resolved, all duty done, the undisputed heirs-at-law of a century of progress, enjoying the heritage at their ease.”

“Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?”

“An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along; he must offer some little opposition.”

“There is nothing to be gained by multiplying social distinctions indefinitely.”

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

“...any one who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums, Paul learned, who find prison so soul destroying.”

“Downstairs Peter Beste-Chetwynde mixed himself another brandy and soda and turned a page in Havelock Ellis, which, next to The Wind in the Willows, was his favourite book.”

“Oh, why did nobody warn me?" cried Grimes in agony. "I should have been told. They should have told me in so many words. They should have warned me about Flossie, not about the fires of hell. I've risked them, and I don't mind risking them again, but they should have told me about marriage. They should have told me that at the end of that gay journey and flower-strewn path were the hideous lights of home and the voices of children.”

“Old boy," said Grimes, "you're in love.""Nonsense!""Smitten?" said Grimes."No, no.""The tender passion?""No.""Cupid's jolly little darts?""No.""Spring fancies, love's young dream?""Nonsense!""Not even a quickening of the pulse?""No.""A sweet despair?""Certainly not.""A trembling hope?""No.""A frisson? a Je ne sais quoi?""Nothing of the sort.""Liar!" said Grimes.”

“Then there was the concert where the boys refused to sing 'God Save the King' because of the pudding they had had for luncheon. One way and another, I have been consistently unfortunate in my efforts at festivity. And yet I look forward to each new fiasco with the utmost relish.”