Lynn > Lynn'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

“If it could only be like this always – always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper...”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

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

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

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

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

“All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day.”
― 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

“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

“Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything. ”
― Evelyn Waugh

“If a thing's worth doing at all, it's worth doing well.”
― Evelyn Waugh

“The worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. That is what it would mean; starting a life with you, without Him.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“It’s awful to think that I shall probably never, as long as I live, see you dancing like that again all by yourself.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies

“It would be a dull world if we all thought alike.”
― Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust

“Of course those that have charm don't really need brains.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“If You Should Go

Love, leave me like the light,
The gently passing day;
We would not know, but for the night,
When it has slipped away.
Go quietly; a dream,
When done, should leave no trace
That it has lived, except a gleam
Across the dreamer's face.”
― Countee Cullen

“I have no will to weep or sing,
No least desire to pray or curse;
The loss of love is a terrible thing;
They lie who say that death is worse.”
― Countee Cullen

“My poetry, I think, has become the way of my giving out what music is within me”
― Countee Cullen

“And if I please you so, my lover,
Remember praise is comely.”
― Countee Cullen

“In order for a writer to succeed, I suggest three things - read and write - and wait.”
― Countee Cullen

“The difference between stupid and intelligent people – and this is true whether or not they are well-educated – is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. ”
― Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

“She's a woman, you're a dude. You're not supposed to understand her. That's not what she's after.... She doesn't want you to understand her. She knows that's impossible. She just wants you to understand yourself. Everything else is negotiable.”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

“See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places,”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

“I don't even want you to nod, that's how much you annoy me. Just freeze and shut up.”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

“Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate.”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

“Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was.”
― Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver

“Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having babies. But America's like this big old clanking smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight.”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash