This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
Don't give your opinions about Art and the Purpose of Life. They are of little interest and, anyway, you can't express them. Don't analyze yourself. Give the relevant facts and let your readers make their own judgments. Stick to your story. It is not the most important subject in history but it is one about which you are uniquely qualified to speak.
If there is a symbol of our age, perhaps it is something that every factory worker does each day of their working lives -- I refer to clocking in. (Very soon probably they won't even have to do that; the clock will itself observe them by radar.) In the ancient world when a person entered a temple, each made a votive offering to a god or a goddess at the door. As twentieth century people file into their shrines, they obediently pay their due to the god that regulates their lives -- the clock. It is the clock that measures us, that silent witness that keeps our going in and our coming out and relentlessly records our every movement. That is where all our organization and machinery to free us from time, to save us time, has brought us. Never before have we had such control over things, and never before have we been so enslaved by them. And of nothing is this more true than of time.
Better | Circumstances | Consideration | Desire | Gentleness | Life | Life | Strength | Will |
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom.
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John 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, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
You spend the first term at Oxford meeting interesting and exciting people and the rest of your time there avoiding them.
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
If, for instance, they have heard something from the postman, they attribute it to "a semi-official statement"; if they have fallen into conversation with a stranger at a bar, they can conscientiously describe him as "a source that has hitherto proved unimpeachable. It is only when the journalist is reporting a whim of his own, and one to which he attaches minor importance, that he defines it as the opinion of "well-informed circles.
Emotions |
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John 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, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
It's the seed of life we carry about with us like our skeletons, each one of us unconsciously pregnant with desirable villa residences. There's no escape. As individuals we simply do not exist. We are just potential home builders, beavers, and ants. How do we come into being? What is birth? (Part One, Chapter XII)
Most of our conflicts and difficulties come from trying to deal with the spiritual and practical aspects of our life separately instead of realizing them as parts of one whole. If our practical life is centered on our own interests, cluttered up by possessions, distracted by ambitions, passions, wants and worries, beset by a sense of our own rights and importance, or anxieties for our own future, or longings for our own success, we need not expect that our spiritual life will be a contrast to all this. The soul's house is not built on such a convenient plan; there are few soundproof partitions in it. Only when the conviction - not merely the idea - that the demand of the Spirit, however inconvenient, rules the whole of it, will those objectionable noises die down which have a way of penetrating into the nicely furnished little oratory and drowning all the quieter voices by their din.
Evelyn Glennie, fully Evelyn Elizabeth Ann Glennie
I often play on the cello-bass side of the orchestra, because I prefer the deep sounds. I can't hear the violins well.
Love |
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
I came to the conclusion many years ago that almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.
Those who complain that they make no progress in the life of prayer because they cannot meditate should examine, not their capacity for meditation, but their capacity for suffering and love. For there is a hard and costly element, a deep seriousness, a crucial choice, in all genuine religion.
Dependence | God | Language | Life | Life | Little | Religion | Universe | God |
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
He had no strength for any other war than his own solitary struggle to keep alive.
Joy |