In this paper, a novel trapezoidal meander-line resonator (TMLR) is proposed to design compact high-order high-temperature superconducting (HTS) linear phase bandpass filters with cascaded quadruplet (CQ) structures. By changing the conventional rectangle half-wavelength meander-line microstrip resonator into a trapezoidal resonator, unnecessary cross coupling between nonadjacent resonators in the CQ units can be avoided. And using the proposed TMLR to design the CQ unit, electric field cross coupling or magnetic field cross coupling can be easily achieved and tuned without the cross-coupling line. To further demonstrate the feasibility of using this configuration for miniaturized circuit design, an 8-order HTS linear phase filter with one pair of transmission zeros was designed. The measured responses agree very well with the simulated results. The physical HTS filter has a center frequency of 1935 MHz and bandwidth of 70 MHz. The out-of-band rejection is greater than 50 dB, and the effective bandwidth of group delay fluctuation less than ±3 ns takes up more than 65% in the whole passband.