Brideshead Revisited

by Evelyn Waugh

I could tell him, too, that to know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.

“Is it nonsense? I wish it were. It sometimes sounds terribly sensible to me.” “But my dear Sebastian, you can’t seriously believe it all.” “Can’t I?” “I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and the ass.” “Oh yes, I believe that. It’s a lovely idea.” “But you can’t believe things because they’re a lovely idea.” “But I do. That’s how I believe.”

I have never met Lady Marchmain; I have seen her once only; but if you live with a man you come to know the other woman he has loved.

“it’s very unexpected for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, but the gospel is simply a catalogue of unexpected things. It’s not to be expected that an ox and an ass should worship at the crib. Animals are always doing the oddest things in the lives of the saints. It’s all part of the poetry, the Alice-in-Wonderland side, of religion.”

“I believe God prefers drunkards to a lot of respectable people.”

He simply wasn’t all there. He wasn’t a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.

and it was happiness enough, now merely to be near her.

“Oh, my darling, why is it that love makes me hate the world? It’s supposed to have quite the opposite effect. I feel as though all mankind, and God, too, were in a conspiracy against us.” “They are, they are.” “But we’ve got our happiness in spite of them; here and now, we’ve taken possession of it. They can’t hurt us, can they?” “Not tonight; not now.” “Not for how many nights?”

“Sometimes,” said Julia, “I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.”

“Living in sin, with sin, always the same, like an idiot child carefully nursed, guarded from the world. ‘Poor Julia,’ they say, ‘she can’t go out. She’s got to take care of her sin. A pity it ever lived,’ they say, ‘but it’s so strong. Children like that always are. Julia’s so good to her little, mad sin.’ ”

“Mummy dying with it; Christ dying with it, nailed hand and foot; hanging over the bed in the night-nursery; hanging year after year in the dark little study at Farm Street with the shining oilcloth; hanging in the dark church where only the old charwoman raises the dust and one candle burns; hanging at noon, high among the crowds and the soldiers; no comfort except a sponge of vinegar and the kind words of a thief; hanging for ever; never the cool sepulcher and the grave clothes spread on the stone slab, never the oil and spices in the dark cave; always the midday sun and the dice clicking for the seamless coat.

It sounds rather complicated, but my dear’—she called me ‘my dear’ about twenty times—‘I’ve usually found every Catholic family has one lapsed member, and it’s often the nicest.’ ”

“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.

The devil resists to the last moment and then the Grace of God is too much for him.

“Now we shall both be alone, and I shall have no way of making you understand.” “I don’t want to make it easier for you,” I said; “I hope your heart may break; but I do understand.” The avalanche was down, the hillside swept bare behind it; the last echoes died on the white slopes; the new mound glittered and lay still in the silent valley.