Perspectives; Evelyn Waugh

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Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh (1903 – 1966) was an English writer of novels, biographies, and travel books; he was also a prolific journalist and book reviewer. His most famous works include the early satires Decline and Fall (1928) and A Handful of Dust (1934), the novel Brideshead Revisited (1945), and the Second World War trilogy Sword of Honour (1952–1961). He is recognised as one of the great prose stylists of the English language in the 20th century.
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“The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what’s been taught and what’s been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn’t know existed.” -1945

“…for in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.”

“He wasn’t a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.”

“My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. These memories, which are my life—for we possess nothing certainly except the past—were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark’s, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder or pecking a broken biscuit from between my lips; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that morning.”

"I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live but I am told that this is a common experience.”

“No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can’t really hate God either. When they want to Hate Him and His saints they have to find something like themselves and pretends it’s God and hate that.”

“To understand all is to forgive all.”
 
I did not know that Evelyn Waugh was a man! 😂
“To understand all is to forgive all.”
I think there is so much truth in this. When someone wrongs us, many times there is something going on, or something from their past, or some totally irrational thing influencing them that has nothing to do with us. It is easy for us to be hurt, when really it had nothing to do with us. And it is easier to forgive if we understand why, even if it doesn’t excuse someone’s actions or words.
 
I did not know that Evelyn Waugh was a man
I didn’t either until this past year. I’d heard reference to him and later understood that, when pronounced EEV-uh-lun, it’s always male, which is how I had heard it spoken. 🙂
 
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