After all, he reflected, his whole uniform was a disguise, his whole new calling a masquerade.
Brideshead Revisited.
It was his misfortune to be respected as a writer by almost everyone except those with whom he most consorted.
They are a very decent, generous lot of people out here and they don’t expect you to listen. Always remember that, dear boy. It’s the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard.
How could I have known? There seemed time for everything in those days; the world was open to be explored at leisure.
Ought we to be drunk every night?” Sebastian asked one morning. “Yes, I think so.” “I think so too.
Sebastian contra mundum.
In the week which preceded the outbreak of the Second World War – days of surmise and apprehension which cannot, without irony, be called the last days of peace – and on the Sunday morning when all doubts were finally resolved and misconceptions corrected, three rich women thought first and mainly of Basil Seal.
Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer has become impossible and your heart has turned to stone.
They are looking for convicts, and as often as not they are rewarded by seeing move across the heath before them a black group of men chained together and uniformly dressed, with a mounted and armed.
These men must die to make a world for Hooper; they were the aborigines, vermin by right of law, to be shot at leisure so that things might be safe for the travelling salesmen.
A blow, expected, repeated, falling upon a bruise with no smart or shock of surprise, only a dull and sickening pain and the doubt whether another like it could be borne.
What is a ‘canty day,’ Dennis?” “I’ve never troubled to ask. Something like Hogmanay, I expect.” “What is that?” “People being sick on the pavement in Glasgow.” “Oh.
The just censure of society is accorded to those so inconstant and intemperate that they must take their pleasures in the unholy market of humanity that still sullies the fame of our civilization; but for the traders themselves, these human vampires who prey upon the degradation of their species, society has reserved the right of ruthless suppression.
I don’t know what it means, but I didn’t mean it.
I expect you’ll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That’s what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour.
From this task of ordered discrimination he had been thrown into the ruthless, cut-throat, rough-and-tumble of the Beast’s Woman’s Page.
Under this liberal and progressive regime, the republic may be said, in some ways, to have prospered.
If she apostatized now, having been brought up in the Church, she would go to hell, while the Protestant girls of her acquaintance, schooled in happy ignorance, could marry eldest sons, live at peace with their world, and get to heaven before her.
The perfect leisure which those people alone enjoy who are untroubled by the speculative or artistic itch.