How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Book.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
At times we all seemed children beside him – at most times, but not always, for there was a bluster and zest in Anthony which the rest of us had shed somewhere in our more leisured adolescence, on the playing field or in the school-room; his vices flourished less in the pursuit of pleasure than in the wish to shock. […] He was competitive in the bet-you-can't-do-this style of the private school. […] He was cruel, too, in the wanton, insect-maiming manner of the very young and 'fearless, like a little boy, charging, head down, small fists whirling, at the school prefects. (1.2.26)
It’d interesting that Charles describes Anthony as childish, when he is in fact the one to impart the most important information to Charles regarding Sebastian and Charles’s own artistry. Looks like another example of the inverse relationship between wisdom and age in Brideshead Revisited.
Quote #5
How ungenerously in later life we disclaim the virtuous moods of our youth, living in retrospect long, summer days of unreflecting dissipation, Dresden figures of pastoral gaiety! Our wisdom, we prefer to think, is all of our own gathering, while, if the truth be told, it is, most of it, the last coin of a legacy that dwindles with time. There is no candour in a story of early manhood which leaves out of account the home-sickness for nursery morality, the regrets and resolutions of amendment, the black hours which, like zero on the roulette table, turn up with roughly calculable regularity. (1.3.6)
All of Brideshead is imbued with this sense of nostalgia for youth. Passages like this one define the novel’s tone.
Quote #6
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; […] but languor – the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding, the sun standing still in the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse – that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it. […] I, at any rate, believed myself very near heaven, during those languid days at Brideshead. (1.4.1)
For Charles, the act of revisiting Brideshead is very much the act of revisiting his youth. The novel isn’t just about this estate, but what the estate represents in Charles’s past.