Quote

Remember that, however patient your study, you will never in adult life learn any language perfectly the best you can hope for is to be a bore.

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
Learn
Bores
Language
Adult
Remember
Perfectly
Best
Patient
Never
Adults
Life
However
Study
Hope
Bore

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Self-sufficiency at home, self-assertion abroad.
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Anyone could write a novel given six weeks, pen paper, and no telephone or wife.
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I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners.
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Port is not for the very young, the vain and the active. It is the comfort of age and the companion of the scholar and the philosopher
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Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases.
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I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.
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He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.
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We class schools into four grades: leading school, first-rate school, good school and school.
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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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We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them...
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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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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.
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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.
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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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Pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.
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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 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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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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The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are.
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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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