- [very drunk, Sebastian has just leaned in through Charles's window and vomited copiously on the floor]
- Old Etonian at Window: I trust that you will forgive my friend. The wines were too various. It was neither the quality nor the quantity that was at fault - it was the mixture. Grasp that and you have the very root of the matter. To understand all is to forgive all.
- Charles Ryder: Each as he came into the room made first for the plovers' eggs, then noticed Sebastian and then myself with a polite lack of curiosity which seemed to say: "We should not dream of being so offensive as to suggest that you never met us before."
- [to Charles Ryder]
- Anthony Blanche: If you knew anything of sexual psychology, you would know that nothing could give me keener pleasure than to be m-m-m-manhandled by you meaty boys - ecstacy of the *naughtiest* kind.
- Charles Ryder: I believed myself very close to heaven during those languid days at Brideshead. It is thus I like to remember Sebastian, as he was that summer when we wandered alone through that enchanted palace.
- [first lines]
- Charles Ryder: Here, at the age of 39, I began to be old. As I lay in that dark hour, I was aghast to realize that something within me, long sickening, had quietly died.
- Charles Ryder: It was as though someone had switched on 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 filled with a multitude of sweet, 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.