Catholics From England

"Certainly one receives few impressions of any spontaneous gaiety or sweetness of nature, for which his friends remember him best, and which obviously made him such an agreeable companion. Similarly there have been few glimpses of the kindliness, or the sudden disarming gentleness, which members of his family most particularly remember."

"If future generations want to know what the second world war was like for English people, they can safely turn to Sword of Honour by Evelyn Waugh (1965), the greatest work of a great English novelist."

"The real motive force of neo-Toryism, giving it its nationalistic character and differentiating it from ordinary Conservatism, is the desire not to recognize that British power and influence have declined. Even those who are realistic enough to see that Britain’s military position is not what it was, tend to claim that ‘English ideas’ (usually left undefined) must dominate the world. All neo-Tories are anti-Russian, but sometimes the main emphasis is anti-American. The significant thing is that this school of thought seems to be gaining ground among youngish intellectual, sometimes ex-Communists, who have passed through the usual process of disillusionment and become disillusioned with that. The anglophobe who suddenly becomes violently pro-British is a fairly common figure. Writers who illustrate this tendency are F. A. Voigt, Malcolm Muggeridge, Evelyn Waugh, Hugh Kingsmill, and a psychologically similar development can be observed in T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and various of their followers."

"Examples of his deft use of the snob-joke could be multiplied almost indefinitely. It can be said indeed that if he were not a snob, if he were not the type of man who refers frequently to "the lower orders" (as he does in Labels) and objects to the presence of natives in first-class railway carriages (as he does in Waugh in Abyssinia) he could not have written such funny books. This is an unpleasant fact; it means that the countless liberal newstatesmanish people who have laughed over these books share unconsciously these prejudices."

"The lady said, "It's no good trying to buy a paper here. That Sir William Beveridge is going to abolish want, so all the papers were sold out". Later that day or the next day I asked him to come to lunch. I was meeting with Evelyn Waugh, an old friend and famous writer. They did not get on at all well. Evelyn Waugh said to him at the end, "How do you get your main pleasure in life, Sir William?" He paused and said, "I get mine trying to leave the world a better place than I found it". Evelyn Waugh said, "I get mine spreading alarm and despondency" — this was in the height of the war — "and I get more satisfaction than you do". So he did not meet with universal acclamation, but nearly everyone admired Beveridge at that time. He was a wonderful man."

"It is impossible to imagine getting a letter from Evelyn Waugh, unless it were of the "Mr Waugh deeply regrets that he is unable to do what is so kindly proposed" sort. In the first place, one would have to have a nursery nickname and be a member of White's, a Roman Catholic, a high-born lady or an Old Etonian 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."

"You know what made me want to become a journalist? Reading Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop when I was about eleven. Enough to make anybody want to be a journalist! I absolutely adored it."

"The Letters of Evelyn Waugh...tops non-fiction that has come my way: a feast of iconoclastic, intellectual entertainment; shrewd, tender, wicked; the man behind the work emerges in all his dazzling radiance of perception and prejudice, and his superb prose create a splendid commentary on his age and contemporaries."

"As expected, this year I most enjoyed The Letters of Evelyn Waugh... Altogether a saturnalia of wit, malice and imagination."

"Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction."

"Your action, and your action alone, determines your worth."

"Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography."

"His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing and jazz — everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime."

"He had no wish to obliterate anything he had written, but he would dearly have liked to revise it, envying painters, who are allowed to return to the same theme time and time again, clarifying and enriching until they have done all they can with it. A novelist is condemned to provide a succession of novelties, new names for characters, new incidents for his plots, new scenery; but, Mr Pinfold maintained, most men harbour the germs of one or two books only; all else is professional trickery of which the most daemonic of the masters — Dickens and Balzac even — were flagrantly guilty."

"Tomorrow and on every anniversary as long as the Happier Hunting Ground existed a postcard would go to Mr. Joyboy: Your little Aimée is wagging her tail in heaven tonight, thinking of you."

"In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice. No one would think of making an after-dinner speech without the help of poetry. It used to be the classics, now it's lyric verse."

"You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs—except in England, of course."

"All day the heat had been barely supportable but at evening a breeze arose in the West, blowing from the heart of the setting sun and from the ocean, which lay unseen, unheard behind the scrubby foothills. It shook the rusty fringes of palm-leaf and swelled the dry sounds of summer, the frog-voices, the grating cicadas, and the ever present pulse of music from the neighbouring native huts."

"Quomodo sedet sola civitas. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity."

"'...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.'"

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

"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."

"[P]erhaps 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."

"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.""

"[W]e possess nothing certainly except the past."

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

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

"'...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."'"

"O God, make me good, but not yet"

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

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

"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."

"'...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.'"

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

"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."

""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."

"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."

"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.'"

"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."

"It is a curious thing... that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste."

"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."

"Up to a point, Lord Copper."

"I will not stand for being called a woman in my own house…"

"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."

"Other nations use 'force'; we Britons alone use 'Might'."

"The Beast stands for strong mutually antagonistic governments everywhere," he said. "Self-sufficiency at home, self-assertion abroad."

"Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole."

"As there was no form of government common to the peoples thus segregated, nor tie of language, history, habit, or belief, they were called a Republic."