I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.
— Evelyn Waugh
Irresistibly Brideshead Revisited quotations
Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.
... To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.
Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.
I've always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. ... Or it may be a private bargain between me and God, that if I give up this one thing I want so much, however bad I am, He won't quite despair of me in the end.
It doesn't matter what people call you unless they call you pigeon pie and eat you up.
O God, make me good, but not yet.
O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin.
Conversation should be like juggling;
up go the balls and plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them.
We possess nothing certainly except the past
If it could only be like this always - always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper.
Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?
I have a good mind not to take Aloysius to Venice.
I don't want him to meet a lot of horrid Italian bears and pick up bad habits.
If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be.
No one is ever holy without suffering.
If Brideshead Revisited is not a great book, it's so like a great book that many of us, at least while reading it, find it hard to tell the difference.
The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are.
No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can't really hate God either.
When they want to Hate Him and His saints they have to find something like themselves and pretends it's God and hate that.
He did not fail in love, but he lost the joy of it [...]
Oh God, make me good, but not yet.
An ideal museum show would be a mating of Brideshead Revisited with House & Garden, provoking intense and pleasurable nostalgia for a past that none of its audience has had.
The languor of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost!
'I don't believe you've changed at all, Charles.
' 'No, I'm afraid not.' 'D'you want to change?' 'It's the only evidence of life.'
Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom.
These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me.
That was the change in her from ten years ago;
that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty.
I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.
It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it is based.
My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. We possess nothing certainly except the past.
The worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. That is what it would mean; starting a life with you, without Him. Julia to Charles
...she had regained what I thought she had lost forever, the magical sadness which had drawn me to her, the thwarted look that had seemed to say, "Surely I was made for some other purpose than this?
I think for Lev [Grossman], C. S. Lewis was a huge inspiration from his childhood. I know that Brideshead Revisited is a book that he's incredibly found of and he took certain structural influences from that book that he brought into The Magicians.