Ex Libris Kirkland

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First Written 1945
Genre Fiction
Origin UK
Publisher Everyman's Library
ISBN-10 0679423001
ISBN-13 978-0679423003
My Copy everyman's clothbound hardback
First Read June 23, 2008

Brideshead Revisited



Light one for me, will you?
It was the first time in my life that anyone had asked this of me, and as I took the cigarette from my lips and put it in hers, I caught a thin bat's squeak of sexuality, inaudible to any but me.

Quoted on October 1, 2011

I'm not going to have you get mixed up with my family. They're so madly charming. All my life they've been taking things away from me. If they once got hold of you with their charm, they'd make you their friend, not mine, and I won't let them.

Quoted on October 1, 2011

The fortnight at Venice passed quickly and sweetly--perhaps too sweetly; I was drowning in honey, stingless.

Quoted on October 1, 2011

But yesterday I got a regular eye-opener. The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what's been taught and what's been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn't know existed.

Quoted on October 1, 2011

We lay in our twin beds, a yard or two distant, smoking. I looked at my watch; it was four o'clock, but neither of us was ready to sleep, for in that city there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.

Quoted on October 1, 2011

Even on that convivial evening I could feel my host emanating little magnetic waves of social uneasiness, creating, rather, a pool of general embarassment about himself in which he floated with loglike calm.

Quoted on October 1, 2011

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.

Quoted on October 1, 2011


Ex Libris Kirkland is a super-self-absorbed reading journal made by Matt Kirkland. Copyright © 2001 - .
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