Quotes from A Handful of Dust

Evelyn Waugh ·  308 pages

Rating: (20.1K votes)


“You can't ever tell what's going to hurt people.”
― Evelyn Waugh, quote from A Handful of Dust


“It would be a dull world if we all thought alike.”
― Evelyn Waugh, quote from A Handful of Dust


“Brenda descended the great staircase step by step through alternations of dusk and rainbow.”
― Evelyn Waugh, quote from A Handful of Dust


“A whole Gothic world had come to grief...there was now no armour glittering through the forest glades, no embroidered feet on the green sward; the cream and dappled unicorns had fled...”
― Evelyn Waugh, quote from A Handful of Dust


“A wonderfully congenial group who live by a unique set of social standards. According to their rules, any sin is acceptable provided it is carried off in good taste.”
― Evelyn Waugh, quote from A Handful of Dust



About the author

Evelyn Waugh
Born place: in Combe Florey, Somerset, England, The United Kingdom
Born date October 28, 1903
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Popular quotes

“My faith has been tempered in Hell. My faith has emerged from the flames of the crematoria, from the concrete of the gas chamber. I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man's meaning.
Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.”
― Vasily Grossman, quote from Life and Fate


“Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and they implied there were endings when in reality there were no endings, everything just went on and on and on.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from Case Histories


“JACK: Apoplexy will do perfectly well, Lots of people die of apoplexy, quite suddenly, don't they?
ALGERNON: Yes, but it's hereditary, my dear fellow. It's a sort of thing that runs in families.
JACK: Good heavens! Then I certainly won't choose that. What can I say?
ALGERNON: Oh! Say influenza.
JACK Oh, no! that wouldn't sound probable at all. Far too many people have had it.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays


“Accumulate, accumulate! This is Moses and the Prophets!”
― Karl Marx, quote from Capital, Vol 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production


“In clear-cutting, he said, you clear away the natural forest, or what the industrial forester calls "weed trees," and plant all one species of tree in neat straight functional rows like corn, sorghum, sugar beets or any other practical farm crop. You then dump on chemical fertilizers to replace the washed-away humus, inject the seedlings with growth-forcing hormones, surround your plot with deer repellants and raise a uniform crop of trees, all identical. When the trees reach a certain prespecified height (not maturity; that takes too long) you send in a fleet of tree-harvesting machines and cut the fuckers down. All of them. Then burn the slash, and harrow, seed, fertilize all over again, round and round and round again, faster and faster, tighter and tighter until, like the fabled Malaysian Concentric Bird which flies in ever-smaller circles, you disappear up your own asshole.”
― Edward Abbey, quote from The Monkey Wrench Gang


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