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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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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
Sensual
Weary
Destructive
Adults
Children
Humorless
Feckless
Defective
Frivolous

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Money is only useful when you get rid of it. It is like the odd card in 'Old Maid' the player who is finally left with it has lost.
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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 anguished suspense of watching the lips you hunger for, framing the words, the death sentence, of sheer triteness!
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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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Of children as of procreation -- the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable
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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.
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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.
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We schoolmasters must temper discretion with deceit.
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Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.
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Enclosing every thin man, there's a fat man demanding elbow-room.
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To understand all is to forgive all.
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I'm quite deaf now such a comfort.
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Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.
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We class schools into four grades: leading school, first-rate school, good school and school.
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Now we shall both be alone, and I shall have no way of making you understand.' 'I don't want to make it easier for you,' I said 'I hope your heart may break but I do understand.
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You can't ever tell what's going to hurt people.
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We are American at puberty. We die French.
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She told me later that she had made a kind of note of me in her mind, as, scanning the shelf for a particular book, one will sometimes have one's attention caught by another, take it down, glance at the title page and saying I must read that, too, when I've the time, replace it and continue the search.
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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.
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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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