Sunday, August 31, 2008

Notable Quotes: Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray

I've just finished reading the very charming, stimulating and exciting novel from Oscar Wilde and wanted to share a few quotes that resonated with me. I find it amazing how one can read a book more than once, or listen to a song twenty times and always find something new. Although I've never read this book before (and am reading it because so many kept pointing me towards it), I think the collection of quotes indicative of what stimulates me and what is happening in my mind at the moment...

"I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious and marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it"

"Words! Mere words! How horrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of a viol or of lute. Mere words! was there anything so real as words?"

"I felt that this grey, monstrous London of ours, with its myriads of people, its sordid sinners, and its splendid sins, as you once phrased it, must have something in store for me. I fancied a thousand things."

"Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them."

"I once wore nothing but violets all through one season, as a form of artistic mourning for a romance that would not die."

"Yet, as has been said of him before, no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself. He felt keenly conscious of how barren all intellectual speculation is when separated from action and experience. He knew that the senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual mysteries to reveal."

"But youth smiles without reason. It is one of its chiefest charms."

"The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young."

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