Evelyn Waugh (1903 – 1966)
English satirical novelist.
If Brideshead Revisited is not a great book, it's so like a great book that many of us, at least while reading it, find it hard to tell the difference.
Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.
"It is typical of Oxford," I said, "to start the new year in autumn."
How ungenerously in later life we disclaim the virtuous moods of our youth, living in retrospect long, summer days of unreflecting dissipation. There is no candour in a story of early manhood which leaves out of account the home-sickness for nursery morality, the regrets and resolutions of amendment, the black hours which, like zero on the roulette table, turn up with roughly calculable regularity."
So the two of them went to London by the early morning train. 'Let's surprise her,' said Nigel, but Cedric telephoned first, wryly remembering the story of the pedantic adulterer - 'My dear, it is I who am surprised; you are astounded.'
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.
There will be a prize of half a crown for the longest essay, irrespective of any possible merit.
O God, make me good, but not yet.
Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.
Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.
A copy of Dante's Purgatorio excited his especial disgust.
Lord Copper quite often gave banquets; it would be an understatement to say that no one enjoyed them more than the host, for no one else enjoyed them at all, while Lord Copper positively exulted in every minute.
To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.
"We, Seth, Emperor of Azania, Chief of Chiefs of Sakuyu, Lord of Wanda and Tyrant of the Seas, Bachelor of the Arts of Oxford University, being in this the twenty-fourth year of our life, summoned by the wisdom of Almighty God and the unanimous voice of our people to the throne of our ancestors, do hereby proclaim. . ." Seth paused in his dictation and gazed out across the harbour where in the fresh breeze of early morning the last dhow was setting sail for the open sea. "Rats," he said; "stinking curs. They are all running away."
The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are.
"I have been here before," I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.
And the only interest about him arises from the unusual series of events of which his shadow was witness.
You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs—except in England, of course.
Other nations use 'force'; we Britons alone use 'Might'.
Your action, and your action alone, determines your worth.