Brideshead Revisited

by

Evelyn Waugh

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on Brideshead Revisited makes teaching easy.

Charles Ryder Character Analysis

Charles Ryder is the protagonist and narrator of Brideshead Revisited. He is a middle-aged Captain the army, in charge of a Company during World War II. He is a misanthropic, reserved, and unhappy individual. Charles dislikes the modern world and has been disappointed with his experiences during World War II. As a young man, he thought that warfare was glorious and noble, and he is disillusioned by the mundane realities of war. Throughout the novel, Charles looks back on his life and examines his memories, which flood back to him one spring morning when his company are sent to a country house called Brideshead Castle. In his youth, Charles is a passionate and romantic young man, who is eager for love and for life experience. He is middle-class, well educated, and attends Oxford University. Although Charles has been given a conventional British upbringing, he longs for experience beyond this. He is curious about other cultures, enjoys travel, and is drawn to people who are unconventional and who break social taboos. At Oxford, he meets and falls in love with Sebastian Flyte, an eccentric young man, and becomes entangled with his family, the Marchmains, who own Brideshead Castle. Eventually, Sebastian descends into alcoholism and erratic behavior, and drops out of Oxford to move abroad, leaving Charles behind. Charles, a lifelong artist, builds a career for himself as an architectural painter in Sebastian’s absence. He despises modern art, however, and believes that everything from the past is grander and more beautiful than the present. This parallels with Charles’s general distaste for the present and idealization of his youth and past relationship with Sebastian. He dislikes fashionable British society, which he marries into when he meets his wife, Celia, and finds his peers shallow and disingenuous. Even as he gets older, Charles is very idealistic and tends to romanticize the past rather than see it objectively. He is deeply affected by his early relationship with Sebastian and is clearly a highly sensitive and loving individual. His experiences with Sebastian, and later with Sebastian’s sister Julia (whom Charles almost marries) emotionally scar him and make him cold and bitter toward life. Throughout his childhood and young adulthood, Charles distrusts religion and is an agnostic. He objects to Julia’s return to Catholicism, which ends their relationship, but is later converted himself.

Charles Ryder Quotes in Brideshead Revisited

The Brideshead Revisited quotes below are all either spoken by Charles Ryder or refer to Charles Ryder. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Innocence, Experience, and Redemption Theme Icon
).
Prologue Quotes

We could watch the madmen, on clement days, sauntering and skipping among the trim gravel walks and pleasantly planted lawns; happy collaborationists who had given up the unequal struggle, all doubts resolved, all duty done, the undisputed heirs-at-law of a century of progress, enjoying the heritage at their ease.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker)
Page Number: 4
Explanation and Analysis:

I lay in that dark hour, I was aghast to realize that something within me, long sickening, had quietly died, and felt as a husband might feel, who, in the fourth year of his marriage, suddenly knew that he had no longer any desire, or tenderness, or esteem, for a once-beloved wife; no pleasure in her company, no wish to please, no curiosity about anything she might ever do or say or think; no hope of setting things right, no self-reproach for the disaster. I knew it all, the whole drab compass of marital disillusion; we had been through it together, the Army and I.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker)
Page Number: 6
Explanation and Analysis:

Gallipoli, Balaclava, Quebec, Lepanto, Bannockburn, Roncevales and Marathon—these, and the Battle in the West where Arthur fell, and a hundred such names whose trumpet-notes, even now in my sere and lawless state, called to me irresistibly across the intervening years with all the clarity and strength of boyhood, sounded in vain to Hooper.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Hooper –
Page Number: 9-10
Explanation and Analysis:

He told me and, on the instant, it was as though someone had switched off the wireless, and a voice that had been bawling in my ears, incessantly, fatuously, for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short; an immense silence followed, empty at first, but gradually, as my outraged sense regained authority, full of a multitude of sweet and natural and long forgotten sounds: for he had spoken a name that was so familiar to me, a conjuror’s name of such ancient power, that, at its mere sound, the phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker)
Related Symbols: Brideshead
Page Number: 16-17
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 1 Quotes

In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman’s day; her autumnal mists, her gray spring time, and the rare glory of her summer days—such as that day—when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamor.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Sebastian Flyte
Page Number: 21
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 2 Quotes

Collins and I spent several economical and instructive weeks together in Ravenna. A bleak wind blew from the Adriatic among those mighty tombs. In a hotel bedroom designed for a warmer season, I wrote long letters to Sebastian and called daily at the post office for his answers.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Sebastian Flyte, Collins
Page Number: 46
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Sebastian Flyte
Page Number: 48
Explanation and Analysis:

I could tell him, too, that to know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom. But I felt no need for these sophistries as I sat before my cousin, saw him, freed from his inconclusive Struggle with Pindar, in his dark gray suit, his white tie, his scholar’s gown; heard his grave tones and, all the time, savored the gillyflowers in full bloom under my windows. I had my secret and sure defense, like a talisman worn in the bosom, felt for in the moment of danger, found and firmly grasped.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Sebastian Flyte, Jasper
Page Number: 49
Explanation and Analysis:

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

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Sebastian Flyte
Page Number: 63
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 3 Quotes

Strife was internecine during the next fortnight, but I suffered the more, for my father had greater reserves to draw on and a wider territory for maneuver […] He never declared his war aims, and I do not to this day know whether they were purely punitive—whether he had really at the back of his mind some geopolitical idea of getting me out of the country, as my Aunt Philippa had been driven to Bordighera and cousin Melchior to Darwin, or whether, as seems most likely, he fought for the sheer love of a battle in which indeed he shone.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Mr. Ryder
Page Number: 79
Explanation and Analysis:

“We’ll have a heavenly time alone,” said Sebastian, and when next morning, while I was shaving, I saw from my bathroom window Julia, with luggage at her back, drive from the forecourt and disappear at the hill’s crest, without a backward glance, I felt a sense of liberation and peace such as I was to know years later when, after a night of unrest, the sirens sounded the “All Clear.”

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Sebastian Flyte, Julia Flyte
Related Symbols: Brideshead
Page Number: 86
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 4 Quotes

Here under that high and insolent dome, under those coffered ceilings; here, as I passed through those arches and broken pediments to the pillared shade beyond and sat, hour by hour, before the fountain, probing its shadows, tracing its lingering echoes, rejoicing in all its clustered feats of daring and invention, I felt a whole new system of nerves alive within me, as though the water that spurted and bubbled among its stones, was indeed a life-giving spring.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Sebastian Flyte
Related Symbols: Brideshead, Fountain
Page Number: 90
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 5 Quotes

“This is no way to start a new year,” said Sebastian; but this somber October evening seemed to breathe its chill, moist air over the succeeding weeks. All that term and all that year Sebastian and I lived more and more in the shadows and, like a fetish, hidden first from the missionary and at length forgotten, the toy bear, Aloysius, sat unregarded on the chest-of-drawers in Sebastian’s bedroom.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Sebastian Flyte (speaker)
Related Symbols: Teddy Bear
Page Number: 118
Explanation and Analysis:

Anthony Blanche had taken something away with him when he went; he had locked a door and hung the key on his chain; and all his friends, among whom he had always been a stranger, needed him now.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Sebastian Flyte, Anthony Blanche
Page Number: 121
Explanation and Analysis:

She found Sebastian subdued, with all his host of friends reduced to one, myself. She accepted me as Sebastian’s friend and sought to make me hers also, and in doing so, unwittingly struck at the roots of our friendship. That is the single reproach I have to set against her abundant kindness to me.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Sebastian Flyte, Lady Marchmain
Page Number: 122
Explanation and Analysis:

He claimed to love the past, but I always felt that he thought all the splendid company, living or dead, with whom he associated slightly absurd; it was Mr. Samgrass who was real, the rest were an insubstantial pageant. He was the Victorian tourist, solid and patronizing, for whose amusement these foreign things were paraded.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Sebastian Flyte, Lady Marchmain, Mr. Samgrass, Ned
Related Symbols: Brideshead
Page Number: 124
Explanation and Analysis:

And since Sebastian counted among the intruders his own conscience and all claims of human affection, his days in Arcadia were numbered. For in this, to me, tranquil time Sebastian took fright. I knew him well in that mood of alertness and suspicion, like a deer suddenly lifting his head at the far notes of the hunt; I had seen him grow wary at the thought of his family or his religion, now I found I, too, was suspect.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Sebastian Flyte
Related Symbols: Brideshead
Page Number: 144
Explanation and Analysis:

Mr. Samgrass’s deft editorship had assembled and arranged a curiously homogeneous little body of writing—poetry, letters, scraps of a journal, an unpublished essay or two, which all exhaled the same high-spirited, serious, chivalrous, other-worldly air and the letters from their contemporaries, written after their deaths, all in varying degrees of articulateness, told the same tale of men who were, in all the full flood of academic and athletic success, of popularity and the promise of great rewards ahead, seen somehow as set apart from their fellows, garlanded victims, devoted to the sacrifice.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Sebastian Flyte, Lady Marchmain, Lord Marchmain, Mr. Samgrass, Ned
Related Symbols: Brideshead
Page Number: 157
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2, Chapter 1 Quotes

“Well. I’m fond of him too, in a way, I suppose, only I wish he’d behave like anybody else. I’ve grown up with one family skeleton, you know papa. Not to be talked of before the servants, not to be talked of before us when we were children. If mummy is going to start making a skeleton out of Sebastian, it’s too much. If he wants to be always tight, why doesn’t he go to Kenya or somewhere where it doesn’t matter?”

Related Characters: Julia Flyte (speaker), Charles Ryder, Sebastian Flyte, Lady Marchmain, Lord Marchmain
Related Symbols: Brideshead, Skull
Page Number: 186
Explanation and Analysis:

But as I drove away and turned back in the car to take what promised to be my last view of the house, I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Sebastian Flyte, Lady Marchmain
Related Symbols: Brideshead
Page Number: 194
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2, Chapter 2 Quotes

Foreigners returning on post from their own waste lands wrote home that here they seemed to catch a glimpse of the world they had believed lost forever among the mud and wire, and through those halcyon weeks Julia darted and shone, part of the sunshine between the trees, part of the candle-light in the mirror’s spectrum, so that elderly men and women, sitting aside with their memories, saw her as herself the blue-bird.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Julia Flyte
Page Number: 206
Explanation and Analysis:

This was the creature, neither child nor woman, that drove me through the dusk that summer evening, untroubled by love, taken aback by the power of her own beauty, hesitating on the cool edge of life; one who had suddenly found herself armed, unawares; the heroine of a fairy story turning over in her hands the magic ring; she had only to stroke it with her fingertips and whisper the charmed word, for the earth to open at her feet and belch forth her titanic servant, the fawning monster who would bring her whatever she asked, but bring it, perhaps, in unwelcome shape.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Julia Flyte
Related Symbols: Brideshead
Page Number: 207
Explanation and Analysis:

He had stepped straight from the underworld into the world of Brenda Champion who was herself the innermost of a number of concentric ivory spheres. Perhaps Julia recognized in Brenda Champion an intimation of what she and her friends might be in twelve years’ time; there was an antagonism between the girl and the woman that was hard to explain otherwise. Certainly the fact of his being Brenda Champion’s property sharpened Julia’s appetite for Rex.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Julia Flyte, Rex Mottram, Brenda Champion
Page Number: 211-212
Explanation and Analysis:

And Lady Marchmain saw this and added it to her new grief for Sebastian and her old grief for her husband and to the deadly sickness in her body, and took all these sorrows with her daily to church; it seemed her heart was transfixed with the swords of her dolors, a living heart to match the plaster and paint; what comfort she took home with her, God knows.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Sebastian Flyte, Julia Flyte, Lady Marchmain, Lord Marchmain, Rex Mottram
Page Number: 217
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3, Chapter 1 Quotes

For nearly ten dead years after that evening with Cordelia I was borne along a road outwardly full of change and incident, but never during that time, except sometimes in my painting—and that at longer and longer intervals—did I come alive as I had been during the time of my friendship with Sebastian. I took it to be youth, not life, that I was losing.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Sebastian Flyte, Cordelia Flyte
Page Number: 259
Explanation and Analysis:

The financial slump of the period, which left many painters without employment, served to enhance my success, which was, indeed, itself a symptom of the decline. When the water-holes were dry people sought to drink at the mirage. After my first exhibition I was called to all parts of the country to make portraits of houses that were soon to be deserted or debased; indeed, my arrival seemed often to be only a few paces ahead of the auctioneer’s, a presage of doom.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker)
Page Number: 260
Explanation and Analysis:
Epilogue Quotes

No, I said, not what it was built for. Perhaps that’s one of the pleasures of building, like having a son, wondering how he’ll grow up. I don’t know; I never built anything, and I forfeited the right to watch my son grow up. I’m homeless, childless, middle-aged, love-less. Hooper.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Hooper –
Related Symbols: Brideshead
Page Number: 401
Explanation and Analysis:
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Charles Ryder Quotes in Brideshead Revisited

The Brideshead Revisited quotes below are all either spoken by Charles Ryder or refer to Charles Ryder. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Innocence, Experience, and Redemption Theme Icon
).
Prologue Quotes

We could watch the madmen, on clement days, sauntering and skipping among the trim gravel walks and pleasantly planted lawns; happy collaborationists who had given up the unequal struggle, all doubts resolved, all duty done, the undisputed heirs-at-law of a century of progress, enjoying the heritage at their ease.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker)
Page Number: 4
Explanation and Analysis:

I lay in that dark hour, I was aghast to realize that something within me, long sickening, had quietly died, and felt as a husband might feel, who, in the fourth year of his marriage, suddenly knew that he had no longer any desire, or tenderness, or esteem, for a once-beloved wife; no pleasure in her company, no wish to please, no curiosity about anything she might ever do or say or think; no hope of setting things right, no self-reproach for the disaster. I knew it all, the whole drab compass of marital disillusion; we had been through it together, the Army and I.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker)
Page Number: 6
Explanation and Analysis:

Gallipoli, Balaclava, Quebec, Lepanto, Bannockburn, Roncevales and Marathon—these, and the Battle in the West where Arthur fell, and a hundred such names whose trumpet-notes, even now in my sere and lawless state, called to me irresistibly across the intervening years with all the clarity and strength of boyhood, sounded in vain to Hooper.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Hooper –
Page Number: 9-10
Explanation and Analysis:

He told me and, on the instant, it was as though someone had switched off the wireless, and a voice that had been bawling in my ears, incessantly, fatuously, for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short; an immense silence followed, empty at first, but gradually, as my outraged sense regained authority, full of a multitude of sweet and natural and long forgotten sounds: for he had spoken a name that was so familiar to me, a conjuror’s name of such ancient power, that, at its mere sound, the phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker)
Related Symbols: Brideshead
Page Number: 16-17
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 1 Quotes

In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman’s day; her autumnal mists, her gray spring time, and the rare glory of her summer days—such as that day—when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamor.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Sebastian Flyte
Page Number: 21
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 2 Quotes

Collins and I spent several economical and instructive weeks together in Ravenna. A bleak wind blew from the Adriatic among those mighty tombs. In a hotel bedroom designed for a warmer season, I wrote long letters to Sebastian and called daily at the post office for his answers.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Sebastian Flyte, Collins
Page Number: 46
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Sebastian Flyte
Page Number: 48
Explanation and Analysis:

I could tell him, too, that to know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom. But I felt no need for these sophistries as I sat before my cousin, saw him, freed from his inconclusive Struggle with Pindar, in his dark gray suit, his white tie, his scholar’s gown; heard his grave tones and, all the time, savored the gillyflowers in full bloom under my windows. I had my secret and sure defense, like a talisman worn in the bosom, felt for in the moment of danger, found and firmly grasped.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Sebastian Flyte, Jasper
Page Number: 49
Explanation and Analysis:

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

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Sebastian Flyte
Page Number: 63
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 3 Quotes

Strife was internecine during the next fortnight, but I suffered the more, for my father had greater reserves to draw on and a wider territory for maneuver […] He never declared his war aims, and I do not to this day know whether they were purely punitive—whether he had really at the back of his mind some geopolitical idea of getting me out of the country, as my Aunt Philippa had been driven to Bordighera and cousin Melchior to Darwin, or whether, as seems most likely, he fought for the sheer love of a battle in which indeed he shone.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Mr. Ryder
Page Number: 79
Explanation and Analysis:

“We’ll have a heavenly time alone,” said Sebastian, and when next morning, while I was shaving, I saw from my bathroom window Julia, with luggage at her back, drive from the forecourt and disappear at the hill’s crest, without a backward glance, I felt a sense of liberation and peace such as I was to know years later when, after a night of unrest, the sirens sounded the “All Clear.”

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Sebastian Flyte, Julia Flyte
Related Symbols: Brideshead
Page Number: 86
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 4 Quotes

Here under that high and insolent dome, under those coffered ceilings; here, as I passed through those arches and broken pediments to the pillared shade beyond and sat, hour by hour, before the fountain, probing its shadows, tracing its lingering echoes, rejoicing in all its clustered feats of daring and invention, I felt a whole new system of nerves alive within me, as though the water that spurted and bubbled among its stones, was indeed a life-giving spring.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Sebastian Flyte
Related Symbols: Brideshead, Fountain
Page Number: 90
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 5 Quotes

“This is no way to start a new year,” said Sebastian; but this somber October evening seemed to breathe its chill, moist air over the succeeding weeks. All that term and all that year Sebastian and I lived more and more in the shadows and, like a fetish, hidden first from the missionary and at length forgotten, the toy bear, Aloysius, sat unregarded on the chest-of-drawers in Sebastian’s bedroom.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Sebastian Flyte (speaker)
Related Symbols: Teddy Bear
Page Number: 118
Explanation and Analysis:

Anthony Blanche had taken something away with him when he went; he had locked a door and hung the key on his chain; and all his friends, among whom he had always been a stranger, needed him now.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Sebastian Flyte, Anthony Blanche
Page Number: 121
Explanation and Analysis:

She found Sebastian subdued, with all his host of friends reduced to one, myself. She accepted me as Sebastian’s friend and sought to make me hers also, and in doing so, unwittingly struck at the roots of our friendship. That is the single reproach I have to set against her abundant kindness to me.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Sebastian Flyte, Lady Marchmain
Page Number: 122
Explanation and Analysis:

He claimed to love the past, but I always felt that he thought all the splendid company, living or dead, with whom he associated slightly absurd; it was Mr. Samgrass who was real, the rest were an insubstantial pageant. He was the Victorian tourist, solid and patronizing, for whose amusement these foreign things were paraded.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Sebastian Flyte, Lady Marchmain, Mr. Samgrass, Ned
Related Symbols: Brideshead
Page Number: 124
Explanation and Analysis:

And since Sebastian counted among the intruders his own conscience and all claims of human affection, his days in Arcadia were numbered. For in this, to me, tranquil time Sebastian took fright. I knew him well in that mood of alertness and suspicion, like a deer suddenly lifting his head at the far notes of the hunt; I had seen him grow wary at the thought of his family or his religion, now I found I, too, was suspect.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Sebastian Flyte
Related Symbols: Brideshead
Page Number: 144
Explanation and Analysis:

Mr. Samgrass’s deft editorship had assembled and arranged a curiously homogeneous little body of writing—poetry, letters, scraps of a journal, an unpublished essay or two, which all exhaled the same high-spirited, serious, chivalrous, other-worldly air and the letters from their contemporaries, written after their deaths, all in varying degrees of articulateness, told the same tale of men who were, in all the full flood of academic and athletic success, of popularity and the promise of great rewards ahead, seen somehow as set apart from their fellows, garlanded victims, devoted to the sacrifice.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Sebastian Flyte, Lady Marchmain, Lord Marchmain, Mr. Samgrass, Ned
Related Symbols: Brideshead
Page Number: 157
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2, Chapter 1 Quotes

“Well. I’m fond of him too, in a way, I suppose, only I wish he’d behave like anybody else. I’ve grown up with one family skeleton, you know papa. Not to be talked of before the servants, not to be talked of before us when we were children. If mummy is going to start making a skeleton out of Sebastian, it’s too much. If he wants to be always tight, why doesn’t he go to Kenya or somewhere where it doesn’t matter?”

Related Characters: Julia Flyte (speaker), Charles Ryder, Sebastian Flyte, Lady Marchmain, Lord Marchmain
Related Symbols: Brideshead, Skull
Page Number: 186
Explanation and Analysis:

But as I drove away and turned back in the car to take what promised to be my last view of the house, I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Sebastian Flyte, Lady Marchmain
Related Symbols: Brideshead
Page Number: 194
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2, Chapter 2 Quotes

Foreigners returning on post from their own waste lands wrote home that here they seemed to catch a glimpse of the world they had believed lost forever among the mud and wire, and through those halcyon weeks Julia darted and shone, part of the sunshine between the trees, part of the candle-light in the mirror’s spectrum, so that elderly men and women, sitting aside with their memories, saw her as herself the blue-bird.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Julia Flyte
Page Number: 206
Explanation and Analysis:

This was the creature, neither child nor woman, that drove me through the dusk that summer evening, untroubled by love, taken aback by the power of her own beauty, hesitating on the cool edge of life; one who had suddenly found herself armed, unawares; the heroine of a fairy story turning over in her hands the magic ring; she had only to stroke it with her fingertips and whisper the charmed word, for the earth to open at her feet and belch forth her titanic servant, the fawning monster who would bring her whatever she asked, but bring it, perhaps, in unwelcome shape.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Julia Flyte
Related Symbols: Brideshead
Page Number: 207
Explanation and Analysis:

He had stepped straight from the underworld into the world of Brenda Champion who was herself the innermost of a number of concentric ivory spheres. Perhaps Julia recognized in Brenda Champion an intimation of what she and her friends might be in twelve years’ time; there was an antagonism between the girl and the woman that was hard to explain otherwise. Certainly the fact of his being Brenda Champion’s property sharpened Julia’s appetite for Rex.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Julia Flyte, Rex Mottram, Brenda Champion
Page Number: 211-212
Explanation and Analysis:

And Lady Marchmain saw this and added it to her new grief for Sebastian and her old grief for her husband and to the deadly sickness in her body, and took all these sorrows with her daily to church; it seemed her heart was transfixed with the swords of her dolors, a living heart to match the plaster and paint; what comfort she took home with her, God knows.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Sebastian Flyte, Julia Flyte, Lady Marchmain, Lord Marchmain, Rex Mottram
Page Number: 217
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3, Chapter 1 Quotes

For nearly ten dead years after that evening with Cordelia I was borne along a road outwardly full of change and incident, but never during that time, except sometimes in my painting—and that at longer and longer intervals—did I come alive as I had been during the time of my friendship with Sebastian. I took it to be youth, not life, that I was losing.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Sebastian Flyte, Cordelia Flyte
Page Number: 259
Explanation and Analysis:

The financial slump of the period, which left many painters without employment, served to enhance my success, which was, indeed, itself a symptom of the decline. When the water-holes were dry people sought to drink at the mirage. After my first exhibition I was called to all parts of the country to make portraits of houses that were soon to be deserted or debased; indeed, my arrival seemed often to be only a few paces ahead of the auctioneer’s, a presage of doom.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker)
Page Number: 260
Explanation and Analysis:
Epilogue Quotes

No, I said, not what it was built for. Perhaps that’s one of the pleasures of building, like having a son, wondering how he’ll grow up. I don’t know; I never built anything, and I forfeited the right to watch my son grow up. I’m homeless, childless, middle-aged, love-less. Hooper.

Related Characters: Charles Ryder (speaker), Hooper –
Related Symbols: Brideshead
Page Number: 401
Explanation and Analysis: