Evelyn Waugh - Brideshead Revisited (1945)

31 Sourced Quotes

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"It is typical of Oxford," I said, "to start the new year in autumn."

Evelyn Waugh
These memories, which are my life—for we possess nothing certainly except the past—were always with me.

Evelyn Waugh
O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin.

Evelyn Waugh
My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.

Evelyn Waugh
"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.

Evelyn Waugh
To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.

Evelyn Waugh
When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning.

Evelyn Waugh
That is not the last word; it is not even an apt word; it is a dead word from ten years back.

Evelyn Waugh
'... I wonder if you remember the story mummy read us the evening Sebastian first got drunk - I mean the bad evening. "Father Brown" said something like "I caught him" (the thief) "with an unseen hook and and invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread."'

Evelyn Waugh
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
Now we shall both be alone, and I shall have no way of making you understand.' 'I don't want to make it easier for you,' I said; 'I hope your heart may break; but I do understand.

Evelyn Waugh
He had aroused three irreconcilable feuds in Capri; he had practiced black art in Cefalu; he had been cured of drug taking in California and of an Oedipus complex in Vienna.

Evelyn Waugh
'... But I saw today there was one thing unforgivable - like things in the school-room, so bad they were unpunishable, that only mummy could deal with - the bad thing I was on the point of doing, that I'm not quite bad enough to do; to set up a rival good to God's.'

Evelyn Waugh
The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are

Evelyn Waugh
His heart; some long word at the heart. He is dying of a long word.

Evelyn Waugh
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
I have lived carefully, sheltered myself from the cold winds, eaten moderately of what was in season, drunk fine claret, slept in my own sheets; I shall live long.

Evelyn Waugh
She seemed to say "Look at me. I have done my share. I am beautiful. It is something quite out of the ordinary, this beauty of mine. I am made for delight. But what do I get out of it? Where is my reward?"
That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, this magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty."

Evelyn Waugh
Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love, it kills art.

Evelyn Waugh
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
'... Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and the plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them. But when dear Sebastian speaks it is like a little sphere of soapsud drifting off the end of an old clay pipe, anywhere, full of rainbow light for a second and then - phut! vanished, with nothing left at all, nothing.'

Evelyn Waugh
But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiousity 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
Free as air; that's what they say- "free as air". Now they bring me my air in an iron barrel.

Evelyn Waugh
She told me later that she had made a kind of note of me in her mind, as, scanning the shelf for a particular book, one will sometimes have one's attention caught by another, take it down, glance at the title page and saying "I must read that, too, when I've the time," replace it and continue the search.

Evelyn Waugh
I caught a thin bat's squeak of sexuality, inaudible to any but me.

Evelyn Waugh
It's a rather pleasant change when all your life you've had people looking after you, to have someone to look after yourself. Only of course it has to be someone pretty hopeless to need looking after by me.

Evelyn Waugh
It doesn't matter what people call you unless they call you pigeon pie and eat you up.

Evelyn Waugh
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
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.

Evelyn Waugh
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 to be whole.

Evelyn Waugh