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Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.

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
Conscious
Either
Inexcusable
Words
Inalienable
Writing
Vulgarity
Meanings
Departure
Metaphor
Basic

More quotes by Evelyn Waugh

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that is not the last word it is not even an apt word it is a dead word from ten years back.
Evelyn Waugh
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News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read.
Evelyn Waugh
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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.
Evelyn Waugh
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My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.
Evelyn Waugh
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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.
Evelyn Waugh
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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.
Evelyn Waugh
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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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The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are.
Evelyn Waugh
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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.
Evelyn Waugh
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Free as air that's what they say- free as air. Now they bring me my air in an iron barrel.
Evelyn Waugh
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If every museum in the New World were emptied, if every famous building in the Old World were destroyed and only Venice saved, there would be enough there to fill a full lifetime with delight. Venice, with all its complexity and variety, is in itself the greatest surviving work of art in the world.
Evelyn Waugh
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Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?
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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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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His heart some long word at the heart. He is dying of a long word.
Evelyn Waugh
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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.
Evelyn Waugh
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There is no ordinary run of mankind, there are only individuals who are totally different. And whether a man is naked and black and stands on one foot in Sudan or is clothed in some kind of costume in a bus in England, they are still individuals of entirely different characters.
Evelyn Waugh
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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.
Evelyn Waugh
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It is typical of Oxford, I said, to start the new year in autumn.
Evelyn Waugh
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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.
Evelyn Waugh