After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can't trust a person.
Evelyn WaughRead
Mr. Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.
Interpretation
Evelyn Waugh praises Wodehouse for creating a timeless literary escape that liberates generations.
In this quote, Evelyn Waugh reflects on the enduring charm and imaginative power of P.G. Wodehouse's writing. Wodehouse's creations provide a delightful escape from the mundane realities of life, offering readers a sanctuary from burdens that may be more challenging than their own times. Waugh suggests that through Wodehouse's idyllic world, readers find solace and joy, enhancing their lives even amidst difficulties.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of literature in our lives.
After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can't trust a person.
It is a curious thing... that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.
There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.
Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.
...she had regained what I thought she had lost forever, the magical sadness which had drawn me to her, the thwarted look that had seemed to say, "Surely I was made for some other purpose than this?
That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty.
Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.
It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.
She doesn't do the things heroines are supposed to. Which is rather Jane Austen's point - Fanny is her subversive heroine. She is gentle and self-doubting and utterly feminine; and given the right circumstances, she would defy an army.
I have been attacked in Turkey more for my interviews than for my books. Political polemicists and columnists do not read novels there.
All books are either dreams or swords, you can cut, or you can drug, with words.
Fiction is the only way I know a human being can inhabit the mind of another human being.
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