Quote

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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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
Objects
Bang
Fall
Bangs
Good
Plates
Like
Solid
Balls
Miss
Conversation
Juggling
Missing
Glitter

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.
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The Welsh are the only nation in the world that has produced no graphic or plastic art, no architecture, no drama. They just sing. Sing and blow down wind instruments of plated silver.
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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.
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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.
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Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love it kills art I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.
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My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.
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Here I am,' I thought, 'back from the jungle, back from the ruins. Here, where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity.
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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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I [had] added another small piece to the pages of the atlas that were real to me.
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I am suing Lord Beaverbrook for libel and hope for some lovely tax-free money in damages. He has very conveniently told some lies about me.
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The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.
Evelyn Waugh
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I'm quite deaf now such a comfort.
Evelyn Waugh
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I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence.
Evelyn Waugh
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I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners.
Evelyn Waugh
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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.
Evelyn Waugh
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It is a curious thing... that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.
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.
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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