Cara: I think you are very fond of Sebastian.
Charles: Why, certainly.
Cara: I know of these romantic friendships of the English and the Germans. They are not Latin. I think they are very good if they do not go on too long. It is a kind of love that comes to children before they know it's meaning. In England it comes when you are almost men. I think I like that. It is better to have that kind of love for another boy than for a girl.
Charles: Why is the house called a 'Castle'
Sebastian: It used to be one until they moved it
Charles: What can you mean?
Sebastian: Just that. We had a castle a mile away, down by the village. Then we took a fancy to the valley and pulled the castle down, carted the stones up here, and built a new house. I'm glad the did, aren't you?
Charles: If it was mine I'd never live anywhere else
Sebastian: But you see, Charles, it isn't mne. Just at the moment it is, but usually it's full of ravening beasts. If it could only be like this always - always summer, always alone, the fruis always ripe, and Aloysius in a good temper ....
Sebastian: Of course those that have charm don't really need brains.
Charles Ryder : The languor of Youth-- how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth-- all save this-- come and go with us through life. These things are a part of life itself; but languor-- the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding-- that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it. Perhaps in the mansions of Limbo the heroes enjoy some such compensation for their loss of the Beatific Vision; perhaps the Beatific Vision itself has some remote kinship with this lowly experience; I, at any rate, believed myself very near heaven, during those languid days at Brideshead.
Sebastian: Ought we to be drunk every night?
Charles: Yes, I think so.
Sebastian: I think so too.
Sebastian: Oh dear, it's very difficult being a Catholic.
Charles: Does it make much difference to you?
Sebastian: Of course. All the time.
Charles: Well, I can't say I've noticed it. Are you struggling against temptation? You don't seem much more virtuous than me.
Sebastian: I'm very, very much wickeder
Charles: But my dear Sebastian, you can't seriously believe it all.
Sebastian: Can't I?
Charles: I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and the ass.
Sebastian: Oh yes, I believe that. It's a lovely idea.
Charles: But you can't believe things because they're a lovely idea.
Sebastian: But I do. That's how I believe.
Lady Marchmain: I've known drunkards before. One of the most terrible things about them is their deceit. Love of truth is the first thing that goes.
Cordelia: Charles, Modern Art is all bosh, isn't it?
Charles: Great bosh.
Cordelia: Oh, I'm so glad. I had an argument with one of our nuns and she said we shouldn't try and criticize what we didn't understand. Now I shall tell her I have had it straight from a real artist, and snubs to her.
Father Mowbray: But yesterday I got a regular eye-opener. The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what's been taught and what's been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into the depths of confusion you didn't know existed.
Cordelia: But God won't let them go for long, you know. I wonder if you remember the story mummy read us the evening Sebastian first got drunk-- I mean the bad evening. "Father Brown" said something like "I caught him" (the thief) "with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.
Cordelia: Well, you see, she was saintly but she wasn't a saint. 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 pretend it's God and hate that. I suppose you think that's all bosh.
Anthony Blanche [After reciting a poem on a balcony]: How I have surprised them! All b-boatmen are Grace Darlings to me.
Sebastian: Ought we to be drunk every night?
Charles: Yes, I think so
Sebastian: I think so too
Charles [on religion]: I suppose they try to make you believe an awful lot of nonsense?
Sebastian: Is it nonsens? I wish it were. It sometimes sounds terribly sensible to me.
Charles: But my dear Sebastian, you can't seriously believe it all!
Sebastian: Can't I?
Charles: I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and the ass.
Sebastian: Oh yes, I believe that. It's a lovely idea.
Charles: But you can't believe things because they're a lovely idea.
Sebastian: But I do. That's how I believe
Julia: 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.
Julia: I've usually found every Catholic family has one lapsed member, and it's often the nicest.
Charles Ryder : I was aghast to realize that something within me, long sickening, had quietly died, and felt as a husband might feel, who, in the fourth year of his marriage, suddenly knew that he had no longer any desire, or tenderness, or esteem, for a once-beloved wife; no pleasure in her company, no wish to please, no curiosity about anything she might ever do or say or think; no hope of setting things right, no self-reproach for the disaster. I knew it all, the whole drab compass of marital disillusion; we had been through it together, the Army and I, from the first importunate courtship until now, when nothing remained to us except the chill bonds of law and duty and custom. I had played every scene in the domestic tragedy, had found the early tiffs become more frequent, the tears less affecting, the reconciliations less sweet, till they engendered a mood of aloofness and cool criticism, and the growing conviction that it was not myself but the loved one who was at fault. I caught the false notes in her voice and learned to listen for them apprehensively; I recognized the blank, resentful stare of incomprehension in her eyes, and the selfish, hard set of the corners of her mouth. I learned her as one must learn a woman one has kept house with, day in, day out, for three and a half years; I learned her slatternly ways, the routine and mechanism of her charm, her jealousy and self-seeking, and her nervous trick with the fingers when she was lying. She was stripped of all enchantment now and I knew her for an uncongenial stranger to whom I had bound myself indissolubly in a moment of folly.
Charles Ryder : Oxford, in those days was still a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman's day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days-- such as that day-- when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamour.
Charles Ryder : Presently we drove on and in another hour were hungry. We stopped at an inn, which was half farm also, and ate eggs and bacon, pickled walnuts and cheese, and drank our beer in a sunless parlour where an old clock ticked in the shadows and a cat slept by the empty grate.
Epilogue by Charles : 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.
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