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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.

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
Littles
Recognition
Veil
Back
Sign
Rent
Little
Passing
Veils
Thing
Bottom
Temple
Childhood
Phrase
Asked
Temples
Knew
Passings
Came
Phrases

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I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.
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His heart some long word at the heart. He is dying of a long word.
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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.
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The splendid thing about education is that everyone wants it. Like influenza, you can give it away without losing any of it yourself.
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The languor of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost!
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Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love it kills art I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.
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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.
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The better sort of Ishmaelites have been Christian for many centuries and will not publicly eat human flesh uncooked in Lent, without special and costly dispensation from their bishop.
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There is something incomparably thrilling in first opening a brand new book.
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If one's object is ascetic, it is far better to stay in London or Paris or New York there is practically no extreme of heat or cold, physical risk, loneliness, hunger or thirst that cannot, with a little ingenuity, be conveniently achieved in the centres of civilization.
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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.
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We schoolmasters must temper discretion with deceit.
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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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If Brideshead Revisited is not a great book, it's so like a great book that many of us, at least while reading it, find it hard to tell the difference.
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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.
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I [had] added another small piece to the pages of the atlas that were real to me.
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It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it is based.
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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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My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. We possess nothing certainly except the past.
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I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence.
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