Modern Art is all bosh, isn't it?

'They never go near the Louvre,' I said, 'or, if they do, it's only because one of their absurd reviews has suddenly "discovered" a master who fits in with that month's aesthetic theory. Half of they are out to make  a popular splash like Picabia; the other half quite simply want to earn their living doing advertisements for Vogue and decorating nightclubs. And the teachers still go on trying to make them paint like Delacroix.'
'Charles,' said Cordelia, 'Modern Art is all bosh, isn't it?'
'Great bosh.'
'Oh, I'm so glad. I had an argument with one of our nuns and she said we shouldn't try and criticize what we didn't understand. Now I shall tell I have had it straight from a real artist and snubs to her.'

E. Waugh, Brideshead revisited (1945), 177

The languor of Youth – how unique and quintessential it is!

The languor of Youth – how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth – all save this – come and go with us through life. These things are a part of life itself; but languor – the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding, the sun standing still in the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse – that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it

E. Waugh, Brideshead revisited (1945), 94

Musicals are for the sorts of people who, even though their coach will be awaiting outside the theatre after the show, take their umbrellas

Musicals are for people who are too thick for opera and too square for pop music. They are for people from the sticks, who migrate en masse  to the major capitals of the world where they enjoy themselves by watching things they have seen before at twice the price they paid last time. Musicals are for the sorts of people who, even though their coach will be awaiting outside the theatre after the show, take their umbrellas.

E. Brockes, What would Babra do? (2008), 45

[Note: this is neither my view, nor that of the author. I love musicals, I just thought this was a brilliant a summary of the (unfair) contempt in which they are held]

The people of Montaillou were not yet afraid of either sex or idleness

The actual morality of the domus of Montaillou was very different from that created later by Protestant and Catholic, Puritan and Jansenist reformations, both kinds intolerant of sex and anxious to make people work. Whether they were Catholic or Cathars or in between, the people of Montaillou were not yet afraid of either sex or idleness.

E. La Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, tr. B. Bray (1978), 331

You have to be a mutton chop, not an earl

[A] Senior conservative, when at lunch, has little leisure for observing anything not immediately on the table in front of him. To attract attention in the dining-room of the Senior Conservative club between the hours of one and two-thirty, you have to be a mutton chop, not an earl.

P.G. Wodehouse, Something Fresh (1915), 38

Never for a second are the words Coca-Cola out of one's sight

The propaganda drive of this firm has been so intensive and so ruthlessly efficient in its execution, that never for a second are the words Coca-Cola out of one's sight. It is on a scale that nobody who has not crossed the Atlantic can hope to grasp. They are printed on almost everything you touch. Everywhere the beaming heroines of these giant advertisements smirk and simper and leer. It becomes the air you breathe, a way of life, an entire civilization - the Coca-Cola age, yoke-fellow of the age of the Atomic Bomb.

P. Leigh Fermor, The Traveller's Tree (1950), 48-49