Quotes from book
Brideshead Revisited

Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh

Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder is a novel by English writer Evelyn Waugh, first published in 1945. It follows, from the 1920s to the early 1940s, the life and romances of the protagonist Charles Ryder, including his friendship with the Flytes, a family of wealthy English Catholics who live in a palatial mansion called Brideshead Castle. Ryder has relationships with two of the Flytes: Sebastian and Julia. The novel explores themes including nostalgia for the age of English aristocracy, Catholicism, and the nearly overt homosexuality of Sebastian Flyte's coterie at Oxford University. A faithful and well-received television adaptation of the novel was produced in an 11-part miniseries by Granada Television in 1981.

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“But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiousity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.”

Evelyn Waugh book Brideshead Revisited

Part 1, Chapter 1
Brideshead Revisited (1945)

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“"I have been here before," I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.”

Evelyn Waugh book Brideshead Revisited

First lines part 1, chapter 1
Brideshead Revisited (1945)

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“…I wonder if you remember the story mummy read us the evening Sebastian first got drunk - I mean the bad evening. "Father Brown" said something like "I caught him" (the thief) "with an unseen hook and and invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread."”

Evelyn Waugh book Brideshead Revisited

This quotes The Queer Feet http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/Complete_Father_Brown/chapter3.html by G. K. Chesterton <br class="br">Brideshead Revisited (1945)

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“It is typical of Oxford," I said, "to start the new year in autumn.”

Evelyn Waugh book Brideshead Revisited

Part 1, start of chapter 4
Brideshead Revisited (1945)

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“…But I saw today there was one thing unforgivable - like things in the school-room, so bad they were unpunishable, that only mummy could deal with - the bad thing I was on the point of doing, that I'm not quite bad enough to do; to set up a rival good to God's.”

Evelyn Waugh book Brideshead Revisited

Part 3, near end of chapter 5
Brideshead Revisited (1945)

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“The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are”

Evelyn Waugh book Brideshead Revisited

Part 1, Chapter 3
Brideshead Revisited (1945)

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“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?"”

Evelyn Waugh book Brideshead Revisited

Part 3, Chapter 4
Brideshead Revisited (1945)

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“perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.”

Evelyn Waugh book Brideshead Revisited

Brideshead Revisited (1945)

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“We possess nothing certainly except the past.”

Evelyn Waugh book Brideshead Revisited

Part 3, start of chapter 1
Brideshead Revisited (1945)

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“…Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and the plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them. But when dear Sebastian speaks it is like a little sphere of soapsud drifting off the end of an old clay pipe, anywhere, full of rainbow light for a second and then - phut! vanished, with nothing left at all, nothing.”

Evelyn Waugh book Brideshead Revisited

Part 1, Chapter 2
Brideshead Revisited (1945)

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“When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning.”

Evelyn Waugh book Brideshead Revisited

First lines of Prologue
Brideshead Revisited (1945)

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“O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin.”

Evelyn Waugh book Brideshead Revisited

Brideshead Revisited (1945)

Evelyn Waugh photo

“How ungenerously in later life we disclaim the virtuous moods of our youth, living in retrospect long, summer days of unreflecting dissipation. There is no candour in a story of early manhood which leaves out of account the home-sickness for nursery morality, the regrets and resolutions of amendment, the black hours which, like zero on the roulette table, turn up with roughly calculable regularity.”

Evelyn Waugh book Brideshead Revisited

Brideshead Revisited (1945)

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“My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.”

Evelyn Waugh book Brideshead Revisited

Brideshead Revisited (1945)

Evelyn Waugh photo

“I have lived carefully, sheltered myself from the cold winds, eaten moderately of what was in season, drunk fine claret, slept in my own sheets; I shall live long.”

Evelyn Waugh book Brideshead Revisited

Part 3, chapter 5, Lord Marchmain's dying soliloquy.
Brideshead Revisited (1945)

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