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Key Quotations – Brideshead Revisited – Chapter Four

‘The languour 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… I …believed myself very near heaven, during those languid days at Brideshead.’ (p. 71)

‘If it could only be like this always – always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe…’ (p. 71)

‘It is thus I like to remember Sebastian, as he was that summer, when we wandered alone together through that enchanted palace…’ (p. 71)

‘…and, in the centre, dominating the whole splendid space rose the fountain; such a fountain… Sebastian set me to draw it… on the rocks grew, in stone, formal tropical vegetations and wild English fern in its natural fronds; through them ran a dozen streams that counterfeited springs, and round them sported fantastic tropical animals, camels and cameleopards and an ebullient lion, all vomiting water…’ (pp. 72-3)

‘This was my conversion to the Baroque… I felt a whole new system of nerves alive within me, as though the water that spurted and bubbled among the stones, was indeed a life-giving spring.’ (pp. 73-4)

‘…And this is a necklace of pearls on a white neck.’

‘Like a swan.’

‘Like the last unicorn.’

And we would leave the golden candlelight of the dining room for the starlight outside and sit on the edge of the fountain, cooling our hands in the water and listening drunkenly to its splash and gurgle over the rocks.’ (p. 76)

‘Brideshead was a place of such enchantment to me that I expected everything and everyone to be unique; Father Phipps was in fact a bland, bun-faced man…’ (p. 76)

‘I had no religion… Later… I have come to accept claims which then, in 1923, I never troubled to examine, and to accept the supernatural as real. I was aware of no such needs that summer at Brideshead.’ (p. 77)

‘It [the Agricultural Show] was a modest two-day show serving the neighbouring parishes, and surviving more as a fair and social gathering than as a centre of serious competition.’ (p. 79)

‘So you see we’re a mixed family religiously. Brideshead and Cordelia are both fervent Catholics; he’s miserable, she’s bird-happy; Julia and I are half-heathen; I am happy, I rather think Julia isn’t; mummy is popularly believed to be a saint and papa is excommunicated – and I wouldn’t know which of them was happy. Anyway, however you look at it, happiness doesn’t seem to have much to do with it, and that’s all I want …’ (p. 80)

‘Good heavens!’ said Sebastian, reaching for a blanket. ‘That sounds like my sister Cordeilia. Cover yourself up.’

‘Where are you?’

There came into view a robust child of ten or eleven; she had the unmistakable family characteristics, but had them ill-arranged in a frank and chubby plainness; two thick old-fashioned pigtails hung down her back.

‘Go away, Cordelia. We’ve got no clothes on.’ (p. 81)

‘Bridey, you mustn’t be pious,’ said Sebastian. ‘We’ve got an atheist with us.’

‘Agnostic,’ I said.

‘Really? Is there much of that at your college? There was a certain amount at Magdalen.’ (p. 82)

‘That night I began to realize how little I really knew of Sebastian, and to understand why he had always sought to keep me apart from the rest of his life. He was like a friend made on board ship, on the high seas; now we had come to his home port.’ (p. 85)

Discuss the long paragraph describing the journey to Venice. (pp 85-6)

‘How did you leave England?’

‘It has been lovely,’ said Sebastian.

‘Was it? Was it? It has been my tragedy that I abominate the English countryside. I suppose it is a disgraceful thing to inherit great responsibilities and to be entirely indifferent to them. I am all the Socialists would have me be, and a great stumbling-block to my own party.’ (p. 89)

‘The fortnight at Venice passed quickly and sweetly – perhaps too sweetly; I was drowning in honey, stingless… it left a confused memory of fierce sunlight on the sands and cool, marble interiors; of water everywhere, lapping on smooth stone, reflected in a dapple of light on painted ceilings; of a night at the Corombona palace such as Byron might have known…’ (p. 91)

‘I remember most particularly one conversation towards the end of my visit…

‘I think you are very fond of Sebastian,’ [Cara] said.

‘Why, certainly.’

‘I know of these romantic friendships of the English and the Germans. They’re not Latin. I think they are very good if they do not go on too long… It is a kind of love that comes to children before they know its meaning. In England it comes when you are almost me; I think I like that. It is better to have that kind of love for another boy than for a girl.’ (pp. 91-2)

‘When people hate with all that energy, it is something in themselves they are hating. Alex is hating all the illusions of boyhood – innocence, God, hope. Poor Lady Marchmain has to bear all that. A woman has not all these ways of loving.

‘Now Alex is very fond of me and I protect him from his own innocence. We are comfortable.

‘Sebastian is in love with his own childhood. That will make him very unhappy. His teddy-bear, his nanny.. and he is nineteen years old…’ (p. 93)

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