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

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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.
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Of the many smells of Athens two seem to me the most characteristic - that of garlic, bold and deadly like acetylene gas. and that of dust, soft and warm and caressing like tweed.
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Her heart was broken perhaps, but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture. In a wider and grander way she felt things had been simplified.
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Limbo is the place. In Limbo one has natural happiness without the beatific vision no harps no communal order but wine and conversation and imperfect, various humanity. Limbo for the unbaptized, for the pious heathen, the sincere sceptic.
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There is something incomparably thrilling in first opening a brand new book.
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That's the public-school system all over. They may kick you out, but they never let you down.
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An artist must be a reactionary
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Beware of writing to me. I always answer ... My father spent the last 20 years of his life writing letters. If someone thanked him for a wedding present, he thanked them for thanking him and there was no end to the exchange but death.
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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.
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Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.
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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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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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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 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.
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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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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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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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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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Saints are simply men & women who have fulfilled their natural obligation which is to approach God.
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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.
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