Quote

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. We possess nothing certainly except the past.

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
Past
Possess
Nothing
Theme
Time
Memory
Except
Certainly
Soared
Memories
Winged
Morning
Grey
War
Host

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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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Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read.
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For in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.
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But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.
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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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If one's object is ascetic, it is far better to stay in London or Paris or New York there is practically no extreme of heat or cold, physical risk, loneliness, hunger or thirst that cannot, with a little ingenuity, be conveniently achieved in the centres of civilization.
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Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.
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Her heart was broken perhaps, but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture. In a wider and grander way she felt things had been simplified.
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I read the newspapers with lively interest. It is seldom that they are absolutely, point-blank wrong. That is the popular belief, but those who are in the know can usually discern an embryo of truth, a little grit of fact, like the core of a pearl, round which have been deposited the delicate layers of ornament.
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Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?
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Beerbohm was a genius of the purest kind. He stands at the summit of his art.
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I've always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. ... Or it may be a private bargain between me and God, that if I give up this one thing I want so much, however bad I am, He won't quite despair of me in the end.
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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 have been in the scholastic profession long enough to know that nobody enters it unless he has some very good reason that he is anxious to conceal.
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I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.
Evelyn Waugh