Waterflo > Waterflo's Quotes

“Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.”
― Evelyn Waugh

“After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can't trust a person.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies

“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, Brideshead Revisited

“Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“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.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“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, Brideshead Revisited

“O God, make me good, but not yet.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“To understand all is to forgive all.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies

“...for in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“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.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them.”
― Evelyn Waugh

“My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. These memories, which are my life—for we possess nothing certainly except the past—were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark’s, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder or pecking a broken biscuit from between my lips; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that morning.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“No one is ever holy without suffering.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“[Change is] the only evidence of life.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“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.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“... To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live but I am told that this is a common experience.”
― Evelyn Waugh

“I can't bare you when you're not amusing.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies

“No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can't really hate God either. When they want to Hate Him and His saints they have to find something like themselves and pretends it's God and hate that.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

“You can't ever tell what's going to hurt people.”
― Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust

“He did not fail in love, but he lost the joy of it [...]”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“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.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“When we argue for our limitations, we get to keep them.”
― Evelyn Waugh

“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.”
― Evelyn Waugh