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An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor [group think] of the age and not go flopping along. By doing this he helps us to question and reassess our past, present and future situations, our assumptions and our options.

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
Future
Group
Tenors
Artist
Along
Reactionary
Helping
Groups
Reactionaries
Art
Question
Assumptions
Past
Present
Options
Must
Stand
Assumption
Reassess
Think
Situation
Situations
Flopping
Thinking
Age
Helps
Tenor

More quotes by Evelyn Waugh

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Medical science has oppressed us with a new huge burden of longevity. It is in that last undesired decade, when passion is cold, appetites feeble, curiosity dulled and experience has begotten cynicism, that accidia lies in wait as the final temptation to destruction.
Evelyn Waugh
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That was the change in her from ten years ago that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence it was the completion of her beauty.
Evelyn Waugh
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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.
Evelyn Waugh
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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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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.
Evelyn Waugh
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Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.
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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Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.
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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You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs except in England, of course.
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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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.
Evelyn Waugh
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He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending to be whole.
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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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.
Evelyn Waugh
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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
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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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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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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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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