Evelyn Waugh

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

“I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners.”

“My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.”

“If she looked further than the wedding, it was to see marriage as the beginning of individual existence, this skirmish from which one one's spurs, from which one set out on the true quests of life.”

“The langour of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth - all save this come and go with us through life...These things are a part of life itself; but languor - the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding, the sun standing still in the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse - that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it.”

“It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one's youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one's stature on the edge of the door.”

“In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice.”

“Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.”

“You can't ever tell what's going to hurt people.”

“One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.”

“Civilization – and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organization of Europe – has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity, and without it has no significance or power to command allegiance…That is the first discovery, that Christianity is essential to civilization and that it is in greater need of combative strength than it has been for centuries.”

“He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.”

“News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead.”

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

“No one is ever holy without suffering.”

“You'll find you spend half your second year shaking off the undesirable friends you made in your first...”

“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.”

“The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.”

“There is a species of person called a 'Modern Churchman' who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief.”

“There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.”