Brideshead Revisited Quotes

“I had been there before; I knew all about it.”

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

“Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols . . . 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.”

“Here love had died between me and the Army.”

“But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity 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 . . . in the heart of that gray city.”

“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.”

“Something quite remote from anything the builders intended has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played . . . a small red flame . . . It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones.”

“I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy.”

“It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one’s youth with a false precocity or a false innocence;”