Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waughwas an English writer of novels, biographies and travel books. He was also a prolific journalist and reviewer of books. His most famous works include the early satires Decline and Falland A Handful of Dust, the novel Brideshead Revisitedand the Second World War trilogy Sword of Honour. Waugh is recognised as one of the great prose stylists of the English language in the 20th century...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth28 October 1903
common-experience common miserable
I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live but I am told that this is a common experience.
funny science technology
A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.
love disappointment spring
Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped 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 the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.
men age bottles
He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending to be whole.
funny humor wells
If a thing's worth doing at all, it's worth doing well.
falling-in-love believe people
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.
past rooms sides
Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.
mean being-in-love doe
After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can't trust a person.
roots and-love brideshead-revisited
... To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.
book hands vases
To see Stephen Spender fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee.
science politician scientist
If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be
writing dust order
Novel-writing is a highly skilled and laborious trade. One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people's conversation. One has for one's raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smoldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables. Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them.
ideas catholic would-be
You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.
action determine
Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.