People From London

"Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb: It is the shut, the curfew sent From there where all surrenders come Which only makes you eloquent."

"Elected Silence, sing to me And beat upon my whorlèd ear, Pipe me to pastures still and be The music that I care to hear."

"I have desired to go Where springs not fail, To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail And a few lilies blow. And I have asked to be Where no storms come, Where the green swell is in the havens dumb, And out of the swing of the sea."

"Beauty … is a relation, and the apprehension of it a comparison."

"It seems then that it is not the excellence of any two things (or more) in themselves, but those two things as viewed by the light of each other, that makes beauty."

"A great work by an Englishman is like a great battle won by England. It is an unfading bay tree."

"That is the great end of empires before God, to be Catholic and draw nations into their Catholicism. But our empire is less and less Christian as it grows."

"It kills me to be time’s eunuch and never to beget."

"You do not mean by mystery what a Catholic does. You mean an interesting uncertainty: the uncertainty ceasing, interest ceases also... But a Catholic by mystery means an incomprehensible certainty: without certainty, without formulation there is no interest;... the clearer the formulation the greater the interest."

"By the by, if the English race had done nothing else, yet if they left the world the notion of a gentleman, they would have done a great service to mankind."

"I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than any other man’s living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession."

"I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds."

"Religion, you know, enters very deep; in reality it is the deepest impression I have in speaking to people, that they are or that they are not of my religion."

"For myself I make no secret, I look forward with eager desire to seeing the matchless beauty of Christ’s body in the heavenly light."

"Our Lord Jesus Christ, my brethren, is our hero, a hero all the world wants."

"Take breath and read it with the ears, as I always wish to be read, and my verse becomes all right."

"The poetical language of an age should be the current language heightened, to any degree heightened and unlike itself, but not...an obsolete one."

"No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness. I hope in time to have a more balanced and Miltonic style. But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music, and design in painting, so design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of calling inscape is what I above all aim at in poetry. Now it is the virtue of design, pattern, or inscape to be distinctive, and it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice I cannot have escaped."

"Every true poet, I thought, must be original and originality a condition of poetic genius; so that each poet is like a species in nature (not an individuum genericum or specificum) and can never recur. That nothing shd. be old or borrowed however cannot be."

"All the world is full of inscape and chance left free to act falls into an order as well as purpose."

"I thought how sadly beauty of inscape was unknown and buried away from simple people and yet how near at hand it was if they had eyes to see it and it could be called out everywhere again."

"I am surprised you should say fancy and aesthetic tastes have led me to my present state of mind: these would be better satisfied in the Church of England, for bad taste is always meeting one in the accessories of Catholicism."

"I think that the trivialness of life is, and personally to each one, ought to be seen to be, done away with by the Incarnation."

"Do you know, a horrible thing has happened to me. I have begun to doubt Tennyson."

"For I think it is the case with genius that it is not when quiescent so very much above mediocrity as the difference between the two might lead us to think, but that it has the power and privilege of rising from that level to a height utterly far from mediocrity: in other words that its greatness is that it can be so great."

"It is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry. The world should know by this time that one cannot reach Parnassus except by flying thither."

"I say more, the just man justices; Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is — Christ — for Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men's faces."

"What I do is me: for that I came."

"On this day by God's grace I resolved to give up all beauty until I had His leave for it."

"It's everyone's destiny to be glooped at some point in their life."

"We all sing about the things we're thinking; musicals are about expressing those emotions that you can't talk about."

"I had to groan a bit on the couch when my brow was mopped—as it is when you've been shot across the chest."

"I've always resisted the idea of becoming a David Hasselhoff, and I hope I'm still resisting it."

"I had my trousers on at all times."

"I am a great believer rather than the popular scientific way of dealing with things that 'Nothing exists unless you can prove it'. I am pretty much the other way that pretty much anything can exist unless you can disprove it."

"I suppose I would be a logical choice to play the Doctor just because Giles, my character in Buffy, has the same light and dark sides and quirkiness as Doctor Who."

"And to get that much talent in the show—and to keep it constant and consistent—I think is a remarkable feat."

"[A]ctors are always trying to cry and people are actually trying not to cry."

"[T]he germ of every season comes from him"

"Have I? I hope somebody beats it out of me very, very soon."

"You have never, I think, known real Grief — panic, melancholia, madness, night-sweats, we've all known for most of our lives — you and me particularly. I'm not sure you know human love in the way I do. You have faith and mysticism — intense inner interests — a diverting, virile mind — gusto for vengeance and destruction if necessary, a fancy — a gospel. What you can't imagine is a creature with a certain iridescent aura and nothing within but a beating frightened heart built round and for Duff. . . For two days I am quite alone — in these empty rooms with one thought one prayer — "let it end now" — an absurd feminine desire to die in the same way exactly as Duff. [ I have now a ] fearlessness of death — so let it come now before custom of living disinclines me for dying."

"In fact, the real problem with the thesis of A Genealogy of Morals is that the noble and the aristocrat are just as likely to be stupid as the plebeian. I had noted in my teens that major writers are usually those who have had to struggle against the odds — to "pull their cart out of the mud," as I put it — while writers who have had an easy start in life are usually second rate — or at least, not quite first-rate. Dickens, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Shaw, H. G. Wells, are examples of the first kind; in the twentieth century, John Galsworthy, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Samuel Beckett are examples of the second kind. They are far from being mediocre writers; yet they tend to be tinged with a certain pessimism that arises from never having achieved a certain resistance against problems."

"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."