Brideshead Revisited Youth Quotes

How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Book.Chapter.Paragraph)

Quote #1

I went there uncertainly, for it was foreign ground and there was a tiny, priggish, warning voice in my ear which […] told me it was seemly to hold back. But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city. (1.1.50)

Charles’s fascination with Sebastian is akin to the childlike wonder of the unknown.

Quote #2

He was magically beautiful, with that epicene quality which in extreme youth sings aloud for love and withers at the first cold wind. (1.1.53)

Charles hints at the fragility and transience of Sebastian’s beauty.

Quote #3

In the event, that Easter vacation formed a short stretch of level road in the precipitous descent of which Jasper warned me. Descent or ascent? It seems to me that I grew younger daily with each adult habit that I acquired. I had lived a lonely childhood […]. 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. (1.2.18)

This is what draws Charles to Sebastian: his beauty, yes, but also his youthfulness.