“Just the place to bury a crock of gold,” said Sebastian. “I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up, and remember.”

 ’Sebastian, idly turning the page of Clive Bell’s Art, read: “Does anyone feel the same kind of emotion for a butterfly or a flower that he feels for a cathedral or a picture? Yes. I do” ‘

 ‘the air of my room heavy with smoke and spice, and my mind weary with metaphysics’

•  “I must go to the Botanical Gardens.”
• “Why?”
• “To see the ivy.”
    
• It seemed a good enough reason and I went with him.  He took my arm as we walked under the walls of Merton.
    
• “I’ve never been to the Botanical Gardens,” I said.
    
• “Oh, Charles, what a lot you have to learn!  There’s a beautiful arch there and more different kinds of ivy than I knew existed.  I don’t know where I should be without the Botanical Gardens.”

 ’Sebastian’s life was governed by a code of such imperatives. “I must have pillar-box red pyjamas,” “I have to stay in bed until the sun works round to the windows,” “I’ve absolutely got to drink champagne tonight!” ‘

 ’He just lives alone in London with no friends and footles about collecting things’

 ‘and pass I did, after a week in which I forbade Sebastian my rooms and sat up to a late hour, with iced black coffee and charcoal biscuits, cramming myself with the neglected texts.’

 ‘I like this bad set and I like getting drunk at luncheon…I could tell him, too, that to know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom’

 ‘So, my dear, I had an omelet and a peach and a bottle of Vichy water and put on my pyjamas and settled down to read.’

 “There was an institution in my day called a ‘sketching club’ - mixed sexes’ (snuffle), ‘bicycles’ (snuffle), ‘pepper-and-salt knickerbockers, holland umbrellas, and, it was popularly thought, free love’ (snuffle), such a lot of nonsense. I expect they still go on. You might try that.”

‘Fear worked like yeast in my thoughts, and the fermentation brought to the surface, in great gobs of scum, the images of disaster’

• “It is a little, shy wine, like a gazelle.”
• “Like a leprechaun.”
• “Dappled, in a tapestry meadow.”
• “Like a flute by still water.”
• “And this is a wise old wine.”
• “A prophet in a cave.”
• “And this is a necklace of pearls on a white neck.”
• “Like a swan.”
• “Like a unicorn.”

• “Ought we to be drunk every night?” Sebastian asked one morning.
• “Yes, I think so.”
• “I think so too.”

•  “What were your girl friends like?”
• “Don’t be prurient,” said Sebastian.
• “Mine was like a skull.”
• “Mine was like a consumptive.”

‘Sebastian counted among the intruders his own conscience and all claims of human affection’

‘men must die to make a world for Hooper; they were the aborigines, vermin by right of law, to be shot off at leisure so that things might be safe for the travelling salesman, with his polygonal pince-nez, his fat wet hand-shake, his grinning dentures.’

• “Shall we get really drunk tonight?”
• “It’s the one time it could do no conceivable harm,” I said.
• “Contra mundum?”
• “Contra mundum.”
• “Bless you, Charles. There aren’t many evenings left to us.” And that night, the first time for many weeks, we got deliriously drunk together; I saw him to the gate as all the bells were striking midnight, and reeled back to my rooms under a starry heaven which swam dizzily among the towers, and fell asleep in my clothes as I had not done for a year.

• “Father, do you particularly want me to take my degree?
• “I want you to? Good gracious, why should I want such a thing? No use to me. Not much use to you either, as far as I’ve seen.”

• “Charles,” said Cordelia, “Modem Art is all bosh, isn’t it?”
• “Great bosh.”
• “Oh, I’m so glad. I had an argument with one of our nuns- and she said we shouldn’t try and criticize what we didn’t understand. Now I shall tell her I have had it straight from a real artist, and snubs to her.”

‘ “Mummy, do look at Rex’s Christmas present.”

It was a small tortoise with Julia’s initials set in diamonds in the living shell, and this slightly obscene object, now slipping impotently on the polished boards, now striding across the card-table, now lumbering over a rug, now withdrawn at a touch, now stretching its neck and swaying its withered, antediluvian head, became a memorable part of the evening, one of those needle-hooks of experience which catch the attention when larger matters are at stake.’

‘ “I have left behind illusion,” I said to myself. “Henceforth I live in a world of three dimensions - with the aid of my five senses.” I have since learned that there is no such world’

 ‘And then, without in the least expecting it, she suddenly found herself in love. It came to her, this disturbing and unsought revelation, one evening in May.’

 ‘She was so hurt and angry that she could barely keep up appearances through dinner; as soon as she could, she went home and cried bitterly for ten minutes; then she felt hungry, wished she had eaten more at dinner, ordered some bread-and-milk, and went to bed saying: “When Mr Mottram telephones in the morning, whatever time it is, say I am not to be disturbed.” ‘

“What a chump! Oh, mummy, what a glorious chump!” 

“…He simply wasn’t all there. He wasn’t a complete human being at all.  He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modem and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole”

•  “You’ll fall in love,” I said.
• “Oh, pray not. I say, do you think I could have another of those scrumptious meringues?”

‘These memories, which are my life - for we possess nothing certainly except the past - were always with me. Like the pigeons of St Mark’s, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder’ 

‘in that city there is a neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy’

•  “What have you been doing in America?”
• She looked up slowly from her chocolate and, her splendid, serious eyes in mine, said: “Don’t you know? I’ll tell you about it sometimes I’ve been a mug. I thought I was in love with someone, but it didn’t turn out that way.” And my mind went back ten years to the evening at Brideshead, when that lovely, spidery child of nineteen, as though brought in for an hour from the nursery and nettled by lack of attention from the grown-ups, had said: “I’m causing anxiety, too, you know,” and I had thought at the time, though scarcely, it now seemed to me, in long trousers myself, “How important these girls make themselves with their love affairs.”

• “Darling, I believe you’ve taken against my bird. Don’t be beastly about it in front of the purser. It was sweet of him to think of it. Besides, you know, if you had read about it in the description of a sixteenth-century banquet in Venice, you would have said those were the days to live.”
• “In sixteenth-century Venice it would have been a somewhat different shape.”
• “Here is Father Christmas. We were just in raptures over your swan.”
• The chief purser came into the room and shook hands, powerfully.  “Dear Lady Celia,” he said, “if you’ll put on your warmest clothes and come on an expedition into the cold storage with me tomorrow, I can show you a whole Noah’s Ark of such objects. The toast will be along in a minute. They’re keeping it hot.” “Toast!” said my wife, as though this was something beyond the dreams of gluttony. “Do you hear that Charles? Toast.”

‘I summoned cataracts and hurricanoes, and as if by conjury the call was immediately answered’

• ‘It was no day for flower vases; I told him to leave them on the floor and then, struck by the thought, removed the card from Mr Kramm’s roses and sent them with my love to Julia.
• She telephoned while I was being shaved.
• “What a deplorable thing to do, Charles! How unlike you!’
• “Don’t you like them?’
• “What can I do with roses on a day like this?’
• “Smell them.’
• There was a pause and a rustle of unpacking.
• “They’ve absolutely no smell at all.”
• “What have you had for breakfast?”
• “Muscat grapes and cantaloupe”
• “When shall I see you?”

“let us not spoil their innocent pleasure. We know, you and I, that this is all t-t-terrible t-t-tripe. Let us go, before we offend the connoisseurs. I know of a louche little bar quite near here”

 “I said, ‘Charles has done something delicious. What will he do next?’ ”

“ ‘Not quite my cup of tea,’ I thought; ‘this is too English.’ I have the fancy for rather spicy things, you know, not for the shade of the cedar tree, the cucumber sandwich, the silver cream-jug, the English girl dressed in whatever English girls do wear for tennis - not that, not Jane Austen, not M-m-miss M-m-mitford.”

 “it was you they talked of, how you had broke away, my dear, gone to the tropics, become a Gauguin, a Rimbaud. You can imagine how my old heart leaped.”

“the gallery after luncheon was so full of absurd women in the sort of hats they should be made to eat”

• “Oh, my darling, why is it that love makes me hate the world? It’s supposed to have quite the opposite effect. I feel as though all mankind, and God, too, were in a conspiracy against us.”
• “They are, they are.”
• “But we’ve got our happiness in spite of them; here and now, we’ve taken possession of it. They can’t hurt us, can they?”
• “Not tonight; not now.”
• “Not for how many nights?”

• “Do you remember,” said Julia, in the tranquil, lime-scented evening, “do you remember the storm?”
• “The bronze doors banging.”
• “The roses in cellophane.”
• “The man who gave the “get-together” party and was never seen again.”
• “Do you remember how the sun came out on our last evening just as it has done today?”

• ‘There was the time you had jaundice and wouldn’t let me see you.’
• ‘And when I had flu and you were afraid to come.’
• ‘Countless visits to Rex’s constituency.’
• ‘And Coronation Week, when you ran away from London. Your goodwill mission to your father-in-law. The time you went to Oxford to paint the picture they didn’t like.  Oh, yes, quite a hundred days.’
• ‘A hundred days wasted out of two years and a bit…not a day’s coldness or mistrust or disappointment.’
• ‘Never that.’
• We fell silent; only the birds spoke in a multitude of small, clear voices in the lime-trees; only the waters spoke among their carved stones.  Julia took the handkerchief from my breast pocket and dried her hand; then lit a cigarette. I feared to break the spell of memories, but for once our thoughts had not kept pace together, for when at length Julia spoke, she said sadly: ‘How many more? Another hundred?’
• ‘A lifetime.’

“Sometimes” said Julia, “I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.”

‘the moonlight lay like hoarfrost on the terrace’

 “Perhaps, I thought, while her words still hung in the air between us like a wisp of tobacco smoke—a thought to fade and vanish like smoke without a trace—perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; a hill of many invisible crests; doors that open as in a dream to reveal only a further stretch of carpet and another door; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.”

“He wanted to go to the bush, as far away as he could get, among the simplest people, to the cannibals. The Superior said: ‘We have no cannibals in our missions.’ He said, well, pygmies would do, or just a primitive village somewhere on a river; or lepers – lepers would do best of anything.”

•  “I once had a governess who jumped off this bridge and drowned herself.”
• “I know.”
• “How could you know?”
• “It was the first thing I ever heard about you, before I ever met you.”
• “How very odd.”

•  “What is it?”
• “His heart; some long word at the heart. He is dying of a long word”

“Why do people always think one is quibbling when one tries to be precise?”

‘brief accesses of hate when she seemed to throw herself against the restraints of her love for me like a caged animal against the bars.’

“Better to-day. I have lived carefully, sheltered myself from the cold winds, eaten moderately of what was in season,  drunk fine claret, slept in my  own  sheets; I shall live long.”