Evelyn Waugh

Oh, why did nobody warn me?" cried Grimes in agony. "I should have been told. They should have told me in so many words. They should have warned me about Flossie, not about the fires of hell. I've risked them, and I don't mind risking them again, but they should have told me about marriage. They should have told me that at the end of that gay journey and flower-strewn path were the hideous lights of home and the voices of children.

After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can't trust a person.

Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist.

Miss Runcible wore trousers and Miles touched up his eye-lashes in the dining-room of the hotel where they stopped for luncheon. So they were asked to leave.

I am sorry to disturb you,' said James politely, 'but these people wished to shoot us.

As my intimacy with his family grew, I became part of the world which he sought to escape; I became one of the bonds which held him.

Rex, in his early forties, had grown heavy and ruddy; he had lost his Canadian accent and acquired instead the hoarse, loud tone that was common to all his friends, as though their voices were perpetually strained to make themselves heard above a crowd, as though, with youth forsaking them, there was no time to wait the opportunity to speak, no time to listen, no time to reply; time for a laugh _ a throaty mirthless laugh, the base currency of goodwill.

Success in this world depends on knowing exactly how little effort each job is worth...distribution of energy...

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

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

The truth is that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up.

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.

Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.

We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us but for ours to amuse them.

Change is the only evidence of life.

Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them.

...any one 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, Paul learned, who find prison so soul destroying.

Ah well, to the journalist every country is rich.