Brideshead Revisited

by Evelyn Waugh

These memories, which are my life – for we possess nothing certainly except the past – were always with me.

she was a daughter, so Rex didn’t so much mind her being dead.

Once I said, ‘You are standing guard over your sadness.’

‘It’s all I have earned. You said yesterday. My wages.’ ‘An I.O.U. from life. A promise to pay on demand.’

‘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.’

I had not forgotten Sebastian. He was with me daily in Julia; or rather it was Julia I had known in him, in those distant Arcadian days.