Quote

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

Evelyn Waugh

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Departure
Metaphor
Basic
Conscious
Either
Inexcusable
Words
Inalienable
Writing
Vulgarity
Meanings

More quotes by Evelyn Waugh

Image
Enclosing every thin man, there's a fat man demanding elbow-room.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
The truth is that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
We are American at puberty. We die French.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them...
Evelyn Waugh
Image
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
Image
It is a curious thing... that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
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
Image
Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
... 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.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
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
Image
The splendid thing about education is that everyone wants it. Like influenza, you can give it away without losing any of it yourself.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
It is typical of Oxford, I said, to start the new year in autumn.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
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
Image
that is not the last word it is not even an apt word it is a dead word from ten years back.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
For in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
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.
Evelyn Waugh
Image
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
Evelyn Waugh
Image
Pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.
Evelyn Waugh