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I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners.

Evelyn Waugh

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Evelyn Waugh
Age: 62 †
Born: 1903
Born: October 28
Died: 1966
Died: April 10
Autobiographer
Diarist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
War Correspondent
Writer
Evelyn Arthur St John Waugh
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh
Manners
Table
Tables
Think
Thinking
Like
Oversensitive
Cliches
Cliche

More quotes by Evelyn Waugh

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Of children as of procreation -- the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable
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It doesn't matter what people call you unless they call you pigeon pie and eat you up.
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Medical science has oppressed us with a new huge burden of longevity. It is in that last undesired decade, when passion is cold, appetites feeble, curiosity dulled and experience has begotten cynicism, that accidia lies in wait as the final temptation to destruction.
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When we argue for our limitations, we get to keep them.
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MGM bores me when I see them, but I don't see them much. They have been a help in getting me introductions to morticians, who are the only people worth knowing.
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I never can understand how two men can write a book together to me that's like three people getting together to have a baby.
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You can't ever tell what's going to hurt people.
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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.
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Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.
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Evelyn Waugh: How do you get your main pleasure in life, Sir William? Sir William Beveridge: I get mine trying to leave the world a better place than I found it. Waugh: I get mine spreading alarm and despondency and I get more satisfaction than you do.
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Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.
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Remember that, however patient your study, you will never in adult life learn any language perfectly the best you can hope for is to be a bore.
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Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?
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I have been in the scholastic profession long enough to know that nobody enters it unless he has some very good reason that he is anxious to conceal.
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I think there's almost nothing I can't excuse except perhaps worshiping graven images. That seems to be idiotic.
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Beerbohm was a genius of the purest kind. He stands at the summit of his art.
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Saints are simply men & women who have fulfilled their natural obligation which is to approach God.
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I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.
Evelyn Waugh
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It is typical of Oxford, I said, to start the new year in autumn.
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... the understatement, the self-ridicule, the delight in the foreignness of foreigners, the complete denial of any attempt to enlist the sympathies of his readers in the hardships he has capriciously invited.
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