Evelyn Waugh

“I had warned my father that my viva might mean a second. It meant a third, and I was overcome with regret, not, I am ashamed to say, for the giddy nights, but for the sober ones. I had not done much work, but I had done some. Had I known I was only to get a third I would not have wasted my time.”

“His courtesy was somewhat extravagant. He would write and thank people who wrote to thank him for wedding presents and when he encountered anyone as punctilious as himself the correspondence ended only with death.”

“Don't give your opinions about Art and the Purpose of Life. They are of little interest and, anyway, you can't express them. Don't analyze yourself. Give the relevant facts and let your readers make their own judgments. Stick to your story. It is not the most important subject in history but it is one about which you are uniquely qualified to speak.”

“Don't hold your parents up to contempt. After all, you are their son, and it is just possible that you may take after them.”

“Of children as of procreation— the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable.”

“One can write, think and pray exclusively of others; dreams are all egocentric.”

“A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it."”

“I put the words down and push them a bit.”

“Aesthetic value is often the by-product of the artist striving to do something else.”

“Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.”

“We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them -- a diminishing number in my case.”

“There is a great deal to be said for the Arts. For one thing they offer the only career in which commercial failure is not necessarily discreditable.”

“Please bear in mind throughout that IT IS MEANT TO BE FUNNY.”

“Mr. Sniggs, the Junior Dean, and Mr. Postlethwaite, the Domestic Bursar, sat alone in Mr. Sniggs's room overlooking the garden quad at Scone College.”

“Augustus Fagan, Esquire, Ph.D., Llanabba Castle, N.Wales, requires immediately junior assistant to teach Classics and English to University Standard with subsidiary Mathematics, German and French. Experience essential;first-class games essential...”

“'But what am I to teach them?' said Paul in sudden panic.”

“I'm one of the blind alleys off the main road of procreation.”

“"We class schools, you see, into four grades: Leading School, First-rate School, Good School, and School. Frankly," said Mr Levy, "School is pretty bad..." (Part One, Chapter One)”

“There will be a prize of half a crown for the longest essay, irrespective of any possible merit.”

“Chokey thinks religion is just divine.”

“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.”

“It's the seed of life we carry about with us like our skeletons, each one of us unconsciously pregnant with desirable villa residences. There's no escape. As individuals we simply do not exist. We are just potential home builders, beavers, and ants. How do we come into being? What is birth? (Part One, Chapter XII)”

“What is this impulse of two people to build their beastly home? It's you & me, unborn, asserting our presence. All we are is a manifestation of the impulse to family life, and if by chance we have escaped the itch ourselves, Nature forces it upon us another way. (Part One, Chapter XII)”

“I don't believe that people would ever fall in love or want to be married if they hadn't been told about it. It's like abroad: no one would want to go there if they hadn't been told it existed.”

“And the only interest about him arises from the unusual series of events of which his shadow was witness.”

“There is a species of person called a 'Modern Churchman' who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief”

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

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

“I came to the conclusion many years ago that almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.”

“I expect you'll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That's what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour.”

“I haven't been to sleep for over a year. That's why I go to bed early. One needs more rest if one doesn't sleep.”

“Anyone 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 who find prison so soul-destroying.”

“Creative Endeavour lost her wings, Mrs. Ape.”

“Mrs. Ape's famous hymn, There ain't no flies on the Lamb of God.”

“A copy of Dante's Purgatorio excited his especial disgust."French, eh?" he said. "I guessed as much, and pretty dirty too, I shouldn't wonder. Now just you wait while I look up these here books"—how he said it!—"in my list. Particularly against books the Home Secretary is. If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside."”

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

“You see my adjutant made rather a silly mistake. He hadn't had much truck with boots before and the silly fellow thought they were extra rations. My men ate the whole bag of tricks last night.”

“Was anyone hurt?" "No one I am thankful to say," said Mrs. Beaver, "except two housemaids who lost their heads and jumped through a glass roof into the paved court.”

“While still a young man, John Courteney Boot had, as his publisher proclaimed, "achieved an assured and enviable position in contemporary letters."”

“As there was no form of government common to the peoples thus segregated, nor tie of language, history, habit, or belief, they were called a Republic.”

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

“The Beast stands for strong mutually antagonistic governments everywhere," he said. "Self-sufficiency at home, self-assertion abroad.”

“Other nations use 'force'; we Britons alone use 'Might'.”

“News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead.”

“He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.”

“I will not stand for being called a woman in my own house…”

“Up to a point, Lord Copper.”

“Lord Copper quite often gave banquets; it would be an understatement to say that no one enjoyed them more than the host, for no one else enjoyed them at all, while Lord Copper positively exulted in every minute.”

“It is a curious thing... that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.”

“The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.”

“So the two of them went to London by the early morning train. 'Let's surprise her,' said Nigel, but Cedric telephoned first, wryly remembering the story of the pedantic adulterer - 'My dear, it is I who am surprised; you are astounded.'”

“When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning.”

“"I have been here before," I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.”

“But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiousity 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.”

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

“It is typical of Oxford," I said, "to start the new year in autumn.”

“My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.”

“We possess nothing certainly except the past.”

“I have lived carefully, sheltered myself from the cold winds, eaten moderately of what was in season, drunk fine claret, slept in my own sheets; I shall live long.”

“O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin.”

“Quomodo sedet sola civitas. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”

“All day the heat had been barely supportable but at evening a breeze arose in the West, blowing from the heart of the setting sun and from the ocean, which lay unseen, unheard behind the scrubby foothills. It shook the rusty fringes of palm-leaf and swelled the dry sounds of summer, the frog-voices, the grating cicadas, and the ever present pulse of music from the neighbouring native huts.”

“You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs—except in England, of course.”

“In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice. No one would think of making an after-dinner speech without the help of poetry. It used to be the classics, now it's lyric verse.”

“Tomorrow and on every anniversary as long as the Happier Hunting Ground existed a postcard would go to Mr. Joyboy: Your little Aimée is wagging her tail in heaven tonight, thinking of you.”

“It may happen in the next hundred years that the English novelists of the present day will come to be valued as we now value the artists and craftsmen of the late eighteenth century.”

“His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing and jazz — everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime.”

“Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.”

“Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.”