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Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases.

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
Courses
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Arresting
Books
Reviewers
Literature
Unhealthy
Read
Craving
Book
Phrases
Many
Professional
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More quotes by Evelyn Waugh

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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.
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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.
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I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.
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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.
Evelyn Waugh
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My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.
Evelyn Waugh
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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.
Evelyn Waugh
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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.
Evelyn Waugh
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Saints are simply men & women who have fulfilled their natural obligation which is to approach God.
Evelyn Waugh
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An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor [group think] of the age and not go flopping along. By doing this he helps us to question and reassess our past, present and future situations, our assumptions and our options.
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Port is not for the very young, the vain and the active. It is the comfort of age and the companion of the scholar and the philosopher
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Here I am,' I thought, 'back from the jungle, back from the ruins. Here, where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity.
Evelyn Waugh
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Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.
Evelyn Waugh
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Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.
Evelyn Waugh
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Enclosing every thin man, there's a fat man demanding elbow-room.
Evelyn Waugh
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Self-sufficiency at home, self-assertion abroad.
Evelyn Waugh
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He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.
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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.
Evelyn Waugh
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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.
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Beerbohm was a genius of the purest kind. He stands at the summit of his art.
Evelyn Waugh
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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. Julia to Charles
Evelyn Waugh