Evelyn Waugh

“Frankly," said the Doctor, "I am at a loss to understand my own emotions. I can think of no entertainment that fills me with greater detestation than a display of competitive athletics, none - except possibly folk dancing.”

“Two wives despaired of him,’ he said. ‘When he got engaged to Sylvia, she made it a condition that he should take the cure at Zurich. And it worked. He came back in three months a different man. And he hasn't touched a drop since, even though Sylvia walked out on him.’ ‘Why did she do that?’Well, poor Charlie got rather a bore when he stopped drinking. But that’s not really the point of the story.”

“But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.”

“What is it about being on a boat that makes everyone behave like a film star?--Julia Flyte”

“So you never got to wherever it was. Weren't you terribly disappointed, Sebastian?--Julia Flyte”

“Beware the Anglo-Catholics. They're all sodomites with unpleasant accents." --Cousin Jasper”

“She told me later that she had made a kind of note of me in her mind, as, scanning the shelf for a particular book, one will sometimes have one's attention caught by another, take it down, glance at the title page and saying "I must read that, too, when I've the time," replace it and continue the search.”

“I never see you now,’ she said. ‘I never seem to see anyone I like. I don’t know why.’But she spoke as though it were a matter of weeks rather than of years; as though, too, before our parting we had been firm friends. It was dead contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the tangle of wire.”

“When we argue for our limitations, we get to keep them.”

“... To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.”

“He had no strength for any other war than his own solitary struggle to keep alive.”

“Have you at any time been detained in a mental home or similar institution? If so, give particulars.''I was at Scone College, Oxford, for two years,' said Paul.”

“Just the place to bury a crock of gold. I should like to bury something precious, in every place I've been happy. And then when I was old, and ugly and miserable, I could come back, and dig it up, and remember.”

“Mr. Schultz, you're jealous of whispering Glades.""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 animals?”

“The cream and hot butter mingled and overflowed separating each glucose bead of caviar from its fellows, capping it in white and gold.”

“Comparisons are odious.”

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

“You can't ever tell what's going to hurt people.”

“Had he not suffered unscathed the fearful dooms of all the offended gods, of all the histories, fire, brimstone, and yawning earthquakes, plague, and pestilence? Had he not stood, like the Pompeian sentry, while the Citadels of the Plain fell to ruin about his ears?”

“What an immature, self-destructive, antiquated mischief is man! How obscure and gross his prancing and chattering on his little stage of evolution! How loathsome and beyond words boring all the thoughts and self-approval of his biological by-product! this half-formed, ill-conditioned body! this erratic, maladjusted mechanism of his soul: on one side the harmonious instincts and balanced responses of the animal, on the other the inflexible purpose of the engine, and between them man, equally alien from the being of Nature and the doing of the machine, the vile becoming!”

“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.”

“I can quite understand that many people may be depressed by the spectacle of naked humanity. Personally I cannot see that an ugly body is any more offensive than an ugly dress.”

“O God, make me good, but not yet.”

“In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice.”

“Creative Endeavour lost her wings, Mrs Ape.”

“...its a rather pleasant change when all your life you've had people looking after you, to have someone to look after yourself. Only of course it has to be someone pretty hopeless to need looking after by me.”

“They are all negros. And the Fascists won’t be called black because of their racial pride, so they are called White after the White Russians. And the Bolsheviks want to be called Black because of their racial pride. So when you say black you mean red, and when you mean red you say white and when the party who call themselves blacks say traitors they mean what we call blacks, but what we mean when we say traitors I really couldn’t tell you. But from your point of view it will be quite simple. Lord Copper only wants patriot victories and both sides call themselves patriots, and of course both sides will claim all the victories. But, of course, it’s really a war between Russia and Germany and Italy and Japan who are all against one another on the patriotic side. I hope I make myself plain?”

“I read the newspapers with lively interest. It is seldom that they are absolutely, point-blank wrong. That is the popular belief, but those who are in the know can usually discern an embryo of truth, a little grit of fact, like the core of a pearl, round which have been deposited the delicate layers of ornament.”

“...she had regained what I thought she had lost forever, the magical sadness which had drawn me to her, the thwarted look that had seemed to say, "Surely I was made for some other purpose than this?”

“The Pension Dressler stood in a side street and had, at first glance, the air rather of a farm than of a hotel. Frau Dressler's pig, tethered by one hind trotter to the jamb of the front door, roamed the yard and disputed the kitchen scraps with the poultry. He was a prodigious beast. Frau Dressler's guests prodded him appreciatively on the way to the dining-room, speculating on how soon he would be ripe for killing. The milch-goat was allowed a narrower radius; those who kept strictly to the causeway were safe, but she never reconciled herself to this limitation and, day in, day out, essayed a series of meteoric onslaughts on the passers-by, ending, at the end of her rope, with a jerk which would have been death to an animal of any other species. One day the rope would break; she knew it, and so did Frau Dressler's guests.”

“Brenda descended the great staircase step by step through alternations of dusk and rainbow.”

“Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.”

“[Change is] the only evidence of life.”

“The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what's been taught and what's been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn't know existed.”

“A conservative is not merely an obstructionist who wishes to resist the introduction of novelties; nor is he, as was assumed by most 19th-century parliamentarians, a brake to frivolous experiment. He has positive work to do ... Civilization has no force of its own beyond what is given from within. It is under constant assault and it takes most of the energies of civilized man to keep going at all ... If [it] falls we shall see not merely the dissolution of a few joint-stock corporations, but of the spiritual and material achievements of our history.”

“Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.”

“Once you start changing a name, you see, there's no reason ever to stop. One always hears one that sounds better.”

“My dear, I should like to stick you full of barbed arrows like a p-p-pin cushion...Where do you lurk? I shall come down your burrow and ch-chivvy you out like an old st-t-toat.”

“If it could only be like this always – always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper...”

“I had been there before; I knew all about it.”

“...for in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.”

“Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them.”

“It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one's youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one's stature on the edge of the door.”

“Julia used to say, 'Poor Sebastian. It's something chemical in him.' That was the cant phrase of the time, derived from heaven knows what misconception of popular science. 'There's something chemical between them' was used to explain the overmastering hate or love of any two people. It was the old concept of determinism in a new form. I do not believe there was anything chemical in my friend.”

“If a thing's worth doing at all, it's worth doing well.”

“But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into the depths of confusion you didn't know existed.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live but I am told that this is a common experience.”