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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
Meanings
Departure
Metaphor
Basic
Conscious
Either
Inexcusable
Words
Inalienable
Writing
Vulgarity

More quotes by Evelyn Waugh

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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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Conversation should be like juggling up go the balls and plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them.
Evelyn Waugh
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Enclosing every thin man, there's a fat man demanding elbow-room.
Evelyn Waugh
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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
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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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You don't remove the evil in a person by killing the person.
Evelyn Waugh
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The sky over London was glorious, ochre and madder, as though a dozen tropic suns were simultaneously setting round the horizon . . . Everywhere the shells sparkled like Christmas baubles.
Evelyn Waugh
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Its theme-- the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters-- was perhaps presumptuously large, but I make no apology for it.
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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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
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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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MGM bores me when I see them, but I don't see them much. They have been a help in getting me introductions to morticians, who are the only people worth knowing.
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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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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The languor of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost!
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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My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.
Evelyn Waugh
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Once you start changing a name, you see, there's no reason ever to stop. One always hears one that sounds better.
Evelyn Waugh
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I have been in the scholastic profession long enough to know that nobody enters it unless he has some very good reason that he is anxious to conceal.
Evelyn Waugh
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His heart some long word at the heart. He is dying of a long word.
Evelyn Waugh