Book 1: Et in Arcadia Ego
Death in the middle of paradise
Prologue
- "grey" "desolated" "brutal" "concrete"
- "here love had died between me and the army"
- "disappointed change to resignation"
- "it was not as it had been"
- "here at the age of thirty-nine, I began to feel old"
- "chill bonds of law and duty and custom"
- Hooper: "they take it out of you in other ways"
Chapter One
- "cloudless" "scents of summer" "laughter" "sweet"
- "I was in search of love in those days"
- "curiosity"
- "enchanted garden"
- "in the heart of that grey city"
- "under the spell of Sebastian"
- "ominous chill"
- "new and secret landscape"
- Sebastian: "we only just got away in time"
- "furtive restlessness and irritability that had possessed him"
- "I should like to bury something precious in every place I have been happy and then when I am old and ugly and miserable I could come back and dig it up and remember"
Chapter Two
- "duty alone had brought him" - about Jasper
- "Sebastian Flyte you seem inseparable from"
- "profligacy about him" - Charles spending money carelessly
- "I happen to like this bad set" - asserting his independence and making his own choices
- "for those hot springs of anarchy rose from the depths where there was no solid earth" - Sebastian does not let rules restrict him
- "I grew younger daily with each adult habit"
- "hear him talk... reminded of... 'bubbles'" - Blanche about Sebastian
Chapter Three
- "I was left, forlorn and regretful"
- "deliberate archaism" - about Ned Ryder, Charles' father
- "the dinner table was our battle field"
- "a stranger in my father's house"
- "counter attack" - a lot of war metaphors used at home
- "strife was internecine"
- "territory for maneuver" - Ned is trying to get rid of Charles
- "I am in morning for my lost innocence" - Sebastian
- "I felt a sense of liberation and peace" - Julia just left and Charles is alone with Sebastian now
Chapter Four
- "languor of youth"
- "believed myself very near heaven"
- "if only it could be like this always"
- "enchanted paradise"
- "an aesthetic education"
- "life giving spring"
- "I'll never mention it again" - the subject of religion
- "happiness doesn't seem to have much to do with it" - being Catholic
- "completely ignorant of women" - Charles
- "I was drowning in honey"
- "romantic friendship" - Charles and Sebastian
- "love that comes to children before they know its meaning"
- "he is a volcano of hate" - Sebastian's father
- "Sebastian is in love with his own childhood"
- "usual air of mild regret"
Chapter Five
- "diffuse and remote"
- "autumnal mood"
- "riotous exuberance of June had died... and yielded"
- "with the resolve to go slow"
- "at long length forgotten, the toy bear, Aloysius sat unregarded on the chest of draws"
- "shadows"
- "without your religion" - religion is what is causing Sebastian's decline
- "I intend to be a painter" - Charles is asserting himself, becoming independent, autonomy
- "so very sorry" - Lady Marchmain about the paintings, unfinished, leaning on Charles emotionally
- "said Sebastian from the shadows" - symbolic of his isolation
- "beyond" - repeated, what is he beyond? help? return?
- "ill" - euphemism for drunk
- "unkempt" "down-at-heel" - Sebastian is broken
- "lures them up herself" - animalistic, predatory of lady Marchmain
- "modern art is all bosh" - Waugh's own opinions are showing through
- "it would choke me" - Charles is loyal to Sebastian
- "peculiar gloom"
- "everyone had been warned" - everyone now is restricting Sebastian's freedom
- "if they treat me like a dipsomaniac..."
- "job as keeper"
- "don't remember it much and that's always a good thing" - Sebastian's search for oblivion, wants to escape himself
- "detach himself for the rest of the party"
- "as a decorative piece... failure" - Charles has grown and become a critic of his own work
- "tortoise" - symbol of new money, vulgar with no taste
Book 2: Brideshead Deserted
Leave behind the Arcadia of 'time' - youth
Chapter One
- "from the shadows beyond the lamplight" "beyond the family circle"
- "guilt hung about him like stale cigar smoke"
- "modern art is all bosh, isn't it?"
- "lures" - Lady Marchmain is like a predator
- "it would choke me" - Charles is loyal to Sebastian
- "everyone had been warned"
- "I don't remember it much and that's always a good sign, isn't it?"
- "a blow, expected, repeated" "dull" "shock" - being a dinner with Sebastian when he was drunk with his family
- "callously wicked" "wantonly cruel" - Lady Marchmain's description of Charles giving Sebastian money
- "I don't understand how we deserved it"
- "I was leaving part of myself behind"
- "ghosts"
- "a door had shut"
- "I have left behind illusion"
- "the world was older and better than Rex knew"
- "mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his"
- "harsh acquisitive world"
Chapter Two
- "as Sebastian in his sharp decline seemed daily to fade and crumble"
- "Julia stand out clear and firm"
- "most brilliant season"
- "last ball of its kind given there"
- "the world was open to be explored at leisure"
- "moment of joy, such as strikes deep to the heart on the river's bank when the king fisher suddenly flares across the water"
- "she shut her mind against religion" - when the priest wouldn't allow her to keep on sleeping with Rex
- "I make money work for me"
- "least intellectual curiosity or natural piety" - Priests description of Rex
- "He wasn't a complete human being at all" - Rex
- "something absoluetly modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce" - Rex
Chapter Three
- "duty lay there" - back to England to help with the General Strike
- "we'll show the dead chaps that we can find too"
- "the stillness of death seemed to be in the house already"
- "what he needs is an occupation" - Sebastian lacks a purpose
- "she really was a femme fatale" "killed at a touch" - Sebastian describing Lady Marchmain
- "pleasant change when you've had people look after you all your life to have someone to look after yourself" - Sebastian about Kurt
- "things have all come to an end very quickly, haven't they"
Book 3: A twitch upon the thread
God allows Catholics a certain amount of freedom before pulling them back to the faith
Chapter ONe
- "my theme is memory"
- "wing host that soared"
- "but never did I come alive as I had been with that friendship with Sebastian"
- "I took it to be youth, not life, that I was losing"
- "catching and keeping the best of each generation" - being a architectural painter
- "I began to mourn the loss of something I had known in the drawing room"
- "long sojourn"
- "pretending to be whole"
- "Mr Ryder, at last, has found himself"
- "No. I am not in love."
- "Just another jungle closing in" - about the modern world
- "centripetal force of our own worlds, and the cold, interstellar space between them"
- "where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity" - the modern world
- "splendid, serious eyes" - Julia description
- "in the love I was soon to have for her" - foreshadowing, prolepsis
- "life size effigy of a swan, moulded in ice" - symbol for beauty decaying
- "ingratiate me" - Celia is like Rex and the modern world, always out for a profit
- "uncontrolled metal" - the swinging doors represent the risk that they're taking
- "when I stood on the extreme verge of love, I still knew what she meant" - he has found that connection
- "love? I'm not asking for love" Julia's reply: "oh, yes you are, Charles."
- "He was the forerunner"
- "They can't do anything except for money" - Rex and is friends, the modern world
- "I knew that our solitude was broken"
- "it was happiness enough now merely to be near her" - Charles about Julia
- "incommunicable content and tranquillity, incommunicable save for me"
Chapter Two
- "why miss an opportunity to give pleasure" - Celia on her ingratiating ways
- "it kills love it kills art" "it has killed you, Charles" - Anthony Blanche on the dangers of charm
- "youth forsaking them"
- "why is it that love makes you hate the world?" - Julia saying to Charles
- "conspiracy against us" - just as it had been Charles and Sebastian against the world, it is now Julia and Charles against the world
Chapter Three
- "we found the world transformed"
- "scattered flames"
- "real peace"
- "strength and splendour"
- "I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all" - Julia
- "live in sin"
- "I was all at sea" - Charles can't understand Julia's religion or her unhappiness
- "You know its all bosh" Julia's reply: "How I wish it was!" - like Sebastian, they can't not believe
Chapter four
- "war could put Rex's fortunes right"
- "perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols"
- "those distant Arcadian days"
- "holiness" Cordielia: "that's what you've got to understand about Sebastian"
- "a wound that wouldn't heal" - Kurt's is physical, Sebastian's is a mental state
- "no one is ever holy without suffering"
- "magical sadness"
Chapter Five
- "old house in the foreground, the rest of the world abandoned and forgotten"
- "peace and love and beauty" - Brideshead
- "witchcraft and hipocracy" - about Catholicism and religion
- "clouds gathered"
- "snow was beginning to shift on the high slopes"
- "I suddenly felt longing for a sign"
- "if I give up this one thing I want so much" - Julia's sacrifice
- "the avalanche was down... the last echoes died on the white slopes"
Epilogue
- "opened the chapel"
- "destructive beggars soldiers are!"
- "I'm homeless, childless, middle-aged, loveless, Hooper"
- "vanities of vanities is all vanity"
- "human tragedy"
- "small red flame"
- "It could have not been lit but for the builders and the tragedians ... burning anew among the old stones" - religion has made a comeback because of the war