Brideshead Revisited Sebastian Quotes

If it could only be like this always – always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper...

That day was the beginning of my friendship with Sebastian, and thus it came about, that morning in June, that I was lying beside him in the shade of the high elms watching the smoke from his lips drift up into the branches.

Sebastian is in love with his own childhood. That will make him very unhappy.

Just the place to bury a crock of gold,' said Sebastian. 'I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.

So through a world of piety I made my way to Sebastian.

I knew Sebastian by sight long before I met him. That was unavoidable for, from his first week, he was the most conspicuous man of his year by reason of his beauty, which was arresting, and his eccentricities of behaviour, which seemed to know no bounds... I was struck less by his looks than by the fact that he was carrying a large teddy-bear".

Ought we to be drunk every night?" Sebastian asked one morning. "Yes, I think so." "I think so too.

Sebastian contra mundum.

Julia used to say, 'Poor Sebastian. It's something chemical in him.' That was the cant phrase of the time, derived from heaven knows what misconception of popular science. 'There's something chemical between them' was used to explain the overmastering hate or love of any two people. It was the old concept of determinism in a new form. I do not believe there was anything chemical in my friend.

So you never got to wherever it was. Weren't you terribly disappointed, Sebastian? --Julia Flyte

Sebastian's life was governed by a code of such imperatives. 'I must have pillar-box red pyjamas,' 'I have to stay in bed until the sun works round the windows,' 'I've absolutely got to drink champagne tonight.

It seems to me that I grew younger daily with each adult habit that I acquired. I had lived a lonely childhood and a boyhood straitened by war and overshadowed by bereavement; to the hard bachelordom of English adolescence, the premature dignity and authority of the school system, I had added a sad and grim strain of my own. Now, that summer term with Sebastian, it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence.

As my intimacy with his family grew, I became part of the world which he sought to escape; I became one of the bonds which held him.

My dear, I could hardly keep still in my chair. I wanted to dash out of the house and leap in a taxi and say, "Take me to Charles's unhealthy pictures." Well, I went, but the gallery after luncheon was so full of absurd women in the sort of hats they should be made to eat, that I rested a little--I rested here with Cyril and Tom and these saucy boys. Then I came back at the unfashionable time of five o'clock, all agog, my dear; and what did I find? I found, my dear, a very naughty and very successful practical joke. It reminded me of dear Sebastian when he liked so much to dress up in false whiskers. It was charm again, my dear, simple, creamy English charm, playing tigers.

Ought we to be drunk every night?” Sebastian asked one morning. “Yes, I think so.” “I think so too.

At Swindon we turned off the main road and, as the sun mounted high, we were among dry-stone walls and ashlar houses. It was about eleven when Sebastian, without warning, turned the car into a cart track and stopped. It was hot enough now to make us seek the shade. On a sheep-cropped knoll under a clump of elms we ate the strawberries and drank the wine--as Sebastian promised, they were delicious together--and we lit fat, Turkish cigarettes and lay on our backs, Sebastian's eyes on the leaves above him, mine on his profile, while the blue-grey smoke rose, untroubled by any wind, to the blue-green shadows of foliage, and the sweet scent of the tobacco merged with the sweet summer scents around us and the fumes of the sweet, golden wine seemed to lift us a finger's breadth above the turf and hold us suspended. "Just the place to bury a crock of gold," said Sebastian. "I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.

I had no mind then for anything except Sebastian, and I saw him already as being threatened, though I did not yet know how black was the threat. His constant, despairing prayer was to be let alone. By the blue waters and rustling palm of his own mind he was happy and harmless as a Polynesian; only when the big ship dropped anchor beyond the coral reef, and the cutter beached in the lagoon, and, up the golden slope that had never known the print of a boot there trod the grim invasion of trader, administrator, missionary and tourist – only then was it time to disinter the archaic weapons of the tribe and sound the drums in the hills; or, more easily, to turn from the sunlit door and lie alone in the darkness, where the impotent, painted deities paraded the walls in vain, and cough his heart out among the rum bottles.

It's frightening," Julia once said, "to think how completely you have forgotten Sebastian." "He was the forerunner." "That's what you said in the storm. I've thought since: perhaps I am only a forerunner, too.

And we would leave the golden candlelight of the dining-room for the starlight outside and sit on the edge of the fountain, cooling our hands in the water and listening drunkenly to its splash and gurgle over the rocks. ‘Ought we to be drunk every night?’ Sebastian asked one morning. ‘Yes, I think so.’ ‘ I think so too.

It was not her way to make a conspicuous entry into anyone’s life, but towards the end of that week Sebastian said rather sourly: “You and mummy seem very thick,” and I realized that in fact I was being drawn into intimacy by swift, imperceptible stages, for she was impatient of any human relationship that fell short of it.

We must go quickly before my sister gets back." "Which are you ashamed of, her or me?" "I'm ashamed of myself," said Sebastian gravely. "I'm not going to have you get mixed up with my family. They're so madly charming. All my life they've been taking thongs from me. If they once got hold of you with your charm, they'd make you their friend not mine, and I won't let them.

Did you have a "little talk" with mummy?' 'Yes.' 'Have you gone over to her side?' The day before I would have said: 'There aren't two sides'; that day I said, 'No, I'm with you, "Sebastian contra mundum.

Did you have a "little talk" with mummy?' 'Yes.' 'Have you gone over to her side?' The day before I would have said: 'There aren't two sides,'; that day I said, 'No, I'm with you, "Sebastian contra mundum".

Have you told Julia this about Sebastian?” “The substance of it; not quite as I told you. She never loved him, you know, as we do.” “Do.” The word reproached me; there was no past tense in Cordelia’s verb “to love.

Why did you marry her?" "Physical attraction. Ambition. Everyone agrees she's the ideal wife for a painter. Loneliness, missing Sebastian." "You loved him, didn't you?" "Oh yes. He was the frontrunner." Julia understood.

Collins had exposed the fallacy of modern aesthetics to me, "… the whole argument from significant form stands or falls by volume. If you allow Cézanne to represent a third dimension on his two-dimensional canvas, then you must allow Landseer his gleam of loyalty in the spaniel's eye" ... but it was not until Sebastian, idly turning the pages of Clive Bell’s Art, read "'Does anyone feel the same kind of emotion for a butterfly or a flower that he feels for a cathedral or a picture?' Yes, I do," that my eyes were opened.

It was during that term that I began to realise that Sebastian was a drunkard in quite a different sense to myself. I got drunk often, but through an excess of high spirits, in the love of the moment, and the wish to prolong and enchant it; Sebastian drank to escape.

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.

It opened a prospect; the prospect one gained at the turn of the avenue, as I had first seen it with Sebastian, of the secluded valley, the lakes falling away one below the other, the old house in the foreground, the rest of the world abandoned and forgotten; a world of its own of peace and love and beauty; a soldier’s dream in a foreign bivouac; such a prospect perhaps as a high pinnacle of the temple afforded after the hungry days in the desert and the jackal-haunted nights. Need I reproach myself if sometimes I was taken by the vision?

For the rest of that term he haunted us. Now that we were ‘gated’ we could not spend our evenings together, and from nine o’clock onwards were alone and at Mr Samgrass’s mercy. Hardly an evening seemed to pass but he called on one or the other of us. He spoke of ‘our little escapade’ as though he, too, had been in the cells, and had that bond with us …. Once I climbed out of college and Mr Samgrass found me in Sebastian’s rooms after the gate was shut and that, too, he made into a bond. It did not surprise me, therefore, when I arrived at Brideshead, after Christmas, to find Mr Samgrass, as though in wait for me, sitting alone before the fire in the room they called the ‘Tapestry Hall’. ‘You find me in solitary possession,’ he said, and indeed he seemed to possess the hall and the sombre scenes of venery that hung round it, to possess the caryatids on either side of the fireplace, to possess me, as he rose to take my hand and greet me like a host:

Wilcox welcomed our interest; we had bottles brought up from every bin, and it was during those tranquil evenings with Sebastian that I first made a serious acquaintance with wine and sowed the seed of a rich harvest which was to be my stay in many barren years. We would sit, he and I, in the Painted Parlour with three bottles open on the table and three glasses before each of us; Sebastian had found a book on wine-tasting, and we followed its instructions in detail. We warmed the glass slightly at a candle, filled it a third high, swirled the wine round, nursed it in our hands, held it to the light, breathed it, sipped it, filled our mouths with it, and rolled it over the tongue, ringing it on the palate like a coin on a counter, tilted our heads back and let it trickle down the throat. Then we talked of it and nibbled Bath Oliver biscuits, and passed on to another wine; then back to the first then on to another, until all three were in circulation and the order of the glasses got confused, and we fell out over which was which, and passed the glasses to and fro between us until there were six glasses, some of them with mixed wines in them which we had filled from the wrong bottle, till we were obliged to start again with three clean glasses each, and the bottles were empty and our praise of them wilder and more exotic. '...It is a little, shy wine like a gazelle.' 'Like a leprechaun.' 'Dappled, in a tapestry meadow.' 'Like a flute by still water.' '...And this is a wise old wine.' 'A prophet in a cave.' '...And this is a necklace of pearls on a white neck.' 'Like a swan.' 'Like the last unicorn.' And we would leave the golden candlelight of the dining-room for the starlight outside and sit on the edge of the fountain, cooling our hands in the water and listening drunkenly to its splash and gurgle over the rocks. 'Ought we to be drunk every night?' Sebastian asked one morning. 'Yes, I think so.' 'I think so too'.