Brighton Pavilion Quotes

I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas. I always find, however, that I am either too busy or too lazy to write this fine work, so I may as well give it away for the purposes of philosophical illustration. There will probably be a general impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool. I am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool. But if you imagine that he felt a fool, or at any rate that the sense of folly was his sole or his dominant emotion, then you have not studied with sufficient delicacy the rich romantic nature of the hero of this tale. His mistake was really a most enviable mistake; and he knew it, if he was the man I take him for. What could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane security of coming home again? What could be better than to have all the fun of discovering South Africa without the disgusting necessity of landing there? What could be more glorious than to brace one’s self up to discover New South Wales and then realize, with a gush of happy tears, that it was really old South Wales. This at least seems to me the main problem for philosophers, and is in a manner the main problem of this book. How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it? How can this queer cosmic town, with its many-legged citizens, with its monstrous and ancient lamps, how can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town and the comfort and honour of being our own town?

Prinny has been an unpopular monarch for 250 years. He spent fortunes on palaces and parks at a time when England needed all the money it could raise to finance the Napoleonic War. Well, the Napoleonic War was followed by the Crimean War and the Boer War and the First World War and the Second World War and they're all long gone. The Pavilion at Brighton and Windsor Castle and Regent Street and Carlton House Terrace and Regent's Park and the Nash Terraces are all still here. Blessings on your far-sighted spendthrift head, Prinny.

David changes the subject and talks about school. We were both at Brighton College, although not at the same time. I’m a dozen years older, but we remember the same teachers, classrooms and dormitories. David went on to become a boarding school legend after getting caught in flagrante delicto with the headmaster’s daughter in the cricket pavilion. Felicity, aged seventeen, had more curves than a scenic railway and by all reports had starred in countless adolescent fantasies among the boarders