Brideshead Revisited

Evelyn Waugh

I suppose this is the time I should give you advice.

Beware of Anglo-Catholics--they're all sodomites with unpleasant accents.

How very boring.

Oh don't talk in that damned bounderish way. Why must you see everything secondhand? Why must this be a play? Why must my conscience be a Pre-Raphaelite picture?

No Charles, not yet. Perhaps never. I don't know. I don't know if I want love.

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

You'll fall in love, I said.
Oh, I pray not. I say, do you think I could have another of those scrumptious meringues?

Living in sin, with sin, by sin, for sin every hour, every day, year in, year out. Waking up with sin in the morning, seeing the curtains drawn on sin, bathing it, dressing it, clipping diamonds to it, feeding it, showing it round, giving it a good time, putting it to sleep at night with a tablet of Dial if it's fretful.
Always the same, like an idiot child carefully nursed, guarded from the world. Poor Julia, they say, she can't go out. She' got to take care of her little 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.
Never the shelter of the cave or of the castle walls. Outcast in the desolate spaces where the hyenas roam at night and the rubbish heaps smoke in the daylight. No way back; the gates barred; all the saints and angels posted along the walls. Nothing but bare stone and dust and the smouldering dumps. Thrown away, scrapped, rotting down; the old man with lupus and the forked stick who limps out at nightfall to turn the rubbish hoping for something to put in his sake something marketable, turns away with disgust.
Nameless and dead, like the baby they wrapped up and took away before I had seen her.

Can't they even let him die in peace?
They mean something different by peace.
It would be an outrage. No one could have made it clearer, all his life, what he thought of religion. They'll come now, when his mind's wandering and he hasn't the strength to resist, and claim him as a death-bed penitent. I've had a certain respect for their Church up till now. If they do a thing like that I shall know that everything stupid people say about them is quite true--that it's all superstition and trickery. Julia said nothing. Don't you agree? Still Julia said nothing. Don't you agree?

It means you can be a nun. If you haven't a vocation it's no good however much you want to be; and if you have a vocation, you can't get away from it, however much you hate it.

Poor simple monk, I thought, poor booby. God forgive me!
The lay brother said: Your friend is so much happier today, it is like one transfigured.
Poor simple monk, I thought, poor booby; but he added, You know why? He has a bottle of cognac in bed with him. It is the second I have found. No sooner do I take one away than he gets another. He is so naughty. It is the Arab boys who fetch it for him. But it is good to see him happy again when he has been so sad.

It hurt to think of Cordelia growing up quite plain; to think of all that burning love spending itself on serum injections and delousing powder. When she arrived, tired from her journey, rather shabby, moving in the manner of one who has no interest in pleasing, I thought her an ugly woman.

When you met me last night did you think, Poor Cordelia, such an engaging child, grown up a plain and pious spinster, full of good works? Did you think 'thwarted'?
It was no time for prevarication. Yes, I said, I did; I don't now, so much.
It's funny, she said, that's exactly the word I thought of for you and Julia. When we were up in the nursery with Nanny. Thwarted passion, I thought.

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.

But you can't believe things because they're a lovely idea.
But I do. That's how I believe.

I was drowning in honey, stingless.

Agree? Agree? My dear boy, you're twenty-two.

I don't know what to say about Brideshead Revisited. You get to decide whether conversion is the last spasm of rebel brain matter or the gift of grace to a humble spirit.