Innocence/ Youth Quotes Flashcards
It is easy retrospectively to endow one’s youth with a false precocity or a false innocence
This shows that Charles has romanticised his time at Oxford with Sebastian and implies that there is a hint of et in Arcadia ego in their Golden Age.
That epicene beauty which in extreme youth sings aloud for love and withers at the first cold wind
Epicene hints at the similarity between Julia and Sebastian. The antipastoral imagery is et in Arcadia ego. It also foreshadows Sebastian’s eventual decline into alcoholism.
All my life they’ve been taking things away from me… they’d make you their friend not mine, and I won’t let them.
Shows Sebastian’s childish idea of possession, just as Samgrass is seen as someone of mummy’s. Also indicates some kind of punishment for a childish tantrum. Charles here is seen as a possession of Sebastian’s… One of his ‘toys’ high in the catalogue of grave sins
Brideshead often has that effect on me. But I had to take you to see nanny.
His childhood home and his family have a negative effect on Sebastian which indicates some kind of childhood trauma. However the nursery and nanny Hawkins are places of refuge for Sebastian, a retreat to a golden age and therefore an inherently pastoral ideal
Summer term with Sebastian… A brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood… 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.
Their youth at Oxford and Brideshead that summer was a golden age, the kind of childhood that Sebastian falls in love with. They revel in otium cum dignitate and retreat to a more innocent time - though not morally.
I must write to you as I am mourning for my lost innocence.
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If it could only be like this always — always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe, and Aloysius in a good temper
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Sebastian is in love with his own childhood. That will make him very unhappy. His teddy-bear, his nanny and he is nineteen years old…
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The garden-room became a rival to the nursery
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My wife’s softness and English reticence, her very white, small regular teeth, her neat rosy fingernails, her schoolgirl air of innocent mischief and her schoolgirl dress… her motherly heart
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As though fondly turning the pages of an old nursery-book, of her childhood, and I lived long, sunny days with her in the meadows, with Nanny Hawkins
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Had it come to him at that moment, an awakened memory of childhood, a dream in the nursery
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Nanny Hawkins did not recognize me until I spoke, and my arrival threw her into some confusion
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