73 quotes
Mrs. Ape's famous hymn, There ain't no flies on the Lamb of God.
Vile Bodies (1930)
The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are
Brideshead Revisited (1945)
It is a curious thing... that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.
Put Out More Flags (1942)
His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing and jazz — everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime.
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957)
While still a young man, John Courteney Boot had, as his publisher proclaimed, "achieved an assured and enviable position in contemporary letters."
Scoop (1938)
Quomodo sedet sola civitas. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
Brideshead Revisited (1945)
A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it."
Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.
Decline and Fall (1928)
Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.
Diaries of Evelyn Waugh (1976)
"Was anyone hurt?"
"No one I am thankful to say," said Mrs. Beaver, "except two housemaids who lost their heads and jumped through a glass roof into the paved court."
A Handful of Dust (1934)
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.
The Loved One (1948)
There is a great deal to be said for the Arts. For one thing they offer the only career in which commercial failure is not necessarily discreditable.
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.
The Loved One (1948)
Anyone 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 who find prison so soul-destroying.
Decline and Fall (1928)
Of children as of procreation— the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable.
There will be a prize of half a crown for the longest essay, irrespective of any possible merit.
Decline and Fall (1928)
I came to the conclusion many years ago that almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.
Decline and Fall (1928)
Please bear in mind throughout that IT IS MEANT TO BE FUNNY.
Decline and Fall (1928)
It may happen in the next hundred years that the English novelists of the present day will come to be valued as we now value the artists and craftsmen of the late eighteenth century.
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957)
Creative Endeavour lost her wings, Mrs. Ape.
Vile Bodies (1930)