Quote collection
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"Human life--that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams."
"They did not understand a single word of what he was saying, but that made no matter, for they put their heads on one side, and looked wise, which is quite as good as understanding a thing, and very much easier."
"The weather still continues charming."
"But what world says that [I'm wicked]? It can only be the next world. This world and I are on excellent terms."
"She knew nothing, but she had everything that he had lost."
"For a year after that was done to me I wept every day at the same hour and for the same space of time. That is not such a tragic thing as possibly it sounds to you. To those who are in prison tears are a part of every day's experience. A day in prison on which one does not weep is a day on which one's heart is hard, not a day on which one's heart is happy."
"He is some brainless, beautiful creature, who should always be here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in the summer when we want something to chill our intelligence."
"I must say... that I ruined myself: and that nobody, great or small, can be ruined except by his own hand."
"If this is the way Queen Victoria treats her prisoners, she doesn't deserve to have any."
"Grass is hard and lumpy and damp, and full of dreadful black insects."
"Oscar Wilde was suing the Marquis of Queensbury in 1895 for libel accusing Wilde of homosexuality Counsel: Have you ever adored a young man madly? Wilde: I have never given adoration to anyone except myself."
"When he takes the knife to the canvass the servants find him lying dead with a knife through is heart and "withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage." and the portrait "in all the wonders of his exquisite youth and beauty." p 349"
"Out of the unreal shadows of night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off... p 207"
"To shut one's eyes to half of life that one may live securely is as though one blinded oneself that one might walk with more safety in a land of pit and precipice."
"It can never be necessary to do what is not honourable."
"My friend is not allowed to go out today. I sit by his side and read him passages from his own life. They fill him with surprise. Everyone should keep someone else's diary; I sometimes suspect you of keeping mine."
"I had buried my romance in a bed of asphodel."
"Can they feel, I wonder, those white silent people we call the dead?"
"Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to someone who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer's day."
"You and I will always be friends." "Yet you poisoned me with a book once. I should not forgive that."