Brideshead Revisited

by Evelyn Waugh

I had reflected then that, whatever scenes of desolation lay ahead of us, I never feared one more brutal than this, and I reflected now that it had no single happy memory for me.

oh to quote this when i finally graduate from this shithole

This was the extreme limit of the city, a fringe of drift-wood above high-water mark. Here the close, homogeneous territory of housing estates and cinemas ended and the hinterland began.

definitely H city...fuck, so accurate

he had spoken a name that was so familiar to me, a conjuror’s name of such ancient power, that, at its mere sound, the phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight.

Which was the mirage, which the palpable earth?

That is the full account of my first brief visit to Brideshead; could I have known then that so small a thing, in other days, would be remembered with tears by a middle-aged captain of infantry?

It is conceivable, but not, I believe, likely, for the hot spring of anarchy rose from deep furnaces where was no solid earth, and burst into the sunlight—a rainbow in its cooling vapours—with a power the rocks could not repress.

‘My dear,’ I said, ‘I may be inverted but I am not insatiable. Come back when you are alone.’

Behind that cold, English, phlegmatic exterior you are An Artist.

he’s a learned bigot, a ceremonious barbarian, a snowbound lama. . . . Well, anything you like.

Boredom grew like a cancer in the breast, more and more; the anguished suspense of watching the lips you hunger for, framing the words, the death sentence, of sheer triteness!