Brideshead Revisited Quotes

“Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“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, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“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; something none of us thought about at the time: a small red flame -- a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design, relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. 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.”
― Evelyn Waugh

“But I had no patience with this convent chatter. I had felt the brush take life in my hand that afternoon; I had had my finger in the great, succulent pie of creation. I was a man of the Renaissance that evening- of Browning's renaissance. I, who had walked the streets of Rome in Genoa velvet and had seen the stars through Galileo's tube, spurned the friars, with their dusty tomes, and their sunken, jealous eyes and their crabbed hair-splitting speech.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“When people hate with all that energy, it is something in themselves they are hating. Alex is hating all the illusions of boyhood - innocence, God, hope. Poor Lady Marchmain has to bear all that. He loved me for a time, quite a short time, as a man loves his own strength; it is simpler for a woman; she has not all these ways of loving. Now Alex is very fond of me and I protect him from his own innocence.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“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.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“...but it was not until Sebastian idly turning the page of Clive Bell's Art, read: '“Does anyone feel the same kind of emotion for a butterfly or a flower that he feels for a cathedral or a picture?” Yes. I do,' that my eyes were opened.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

“I don't thinks she cares for anyone much. I love her. She's so like me."

"Do you? Is she?"

"In looks and the way she talks. I wouldn't love anyone with a character like mine.”
― Evelyn Waugh