Brideshead Revisited Family Quotes

"It's odd because there's really no mystery about him except how he came to be born of such a very sinister family.

"I forget if you know his family. Now there, my dear, is a subject for the poet – for the poet of the future who must be also a psychoanalyst – and perhaps a diabolist, too. I don't suppose he'll ever let you meet them. He's far too clever. They're all charming, of course, and quite, quite gruesome. Do you ever feel is something a teeny bit gruesome about Sebastian? No? Perhaps I imagine it; it's simply that he looks so like the rest of them, sometimes." (1.2.43-4)

"Well, I'm the worst person to come to for advice. I've never been 'short,' as you so painfully call it. And yet what else could you say? Hard up? Penurious? Distressed? Embarrassed? Stony-broke?" […] I had not seen my father so gleeful since he found two pages of second-century papyrus between the leaves of a Lombardic breviary. […] For the rest of dinner he was silent save for an occasional snuffle of merriment which could not, I thought, be provoked by the work he read. (1.3.23-8)

It was largely by reason of my Aunt Philippa that I now found myself so much a stranger in my father's house. After my mother's death she came to live with my father and me, no doubt, as he said, with the idea of making her home with us. I knew nothing, then, of the nightly agonies at the dinner table. […] Then in my last year at school she left England. "I got her out in the end" he said with derision and triumph of that kindly lady, and he knew that I heard in the words a challenge to myself. (1.3.50)