Quote

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

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Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?
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I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners.
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The only thing that it is advisable to know in any language is the numerals and even there, you can do a lot with the fingers.
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There is something incomparably thrilling in first opening a brand new book.
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Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.
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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.
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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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You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs except in England, of course.
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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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I have lived carefully, sheltered myself from the cold winds, eaten moderately of what was in season, drunk fine claret, slept in my own sheets I shall live long.
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It is typical of Oxford, I said, to start the new year in autumn.
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We are American at puberty. We die French.
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You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.
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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.
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He did not fail in love, but he lost the joy of it [...]
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You don't remove the evil in a person by killing the person.
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Enclosing every thin man, there's a fat man demanding elbow-room.
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If Brideshead Revisited is not a great book, it's so like a great book that many of us, at least while reading it, find it hard to tell the difference.
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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.
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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.
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