“He played with the idea, and grew willful; tossed it into the air and transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy, and winged it with paradox. The praise of folly, as he went on, soared into a philosophy, and Philosophy herself became young, and catching the mad music of Pleasure, wearing, one might fancy, her wine-stained robe and wreath of ivy, danced like a Bacchante over the hills of life, and mocked the slow Silenus for being sober. Facts fled before her like frightened forest things. Her white feed trod the huge press at which wise Omar sits, till the seething grape-juice rose round her bare limbs in waves of purple bubbles, or crawled in red foam over the vat's black, dripping, sloping sides. It was an extraordinary improvisation. He felt that the eyes of Dorian Gray were fixed on him, and the consciousness that amongst his audience there was one whose temperament he wished to fascinate, seemed to give his wit keenness, and to lend colour to his imagination. He was brilliant, fantastic, irresponsible. He charmed his listeners out of themselves, and they followed his pipe laughing. Dorian Gray never took his gaze off him, but sat like one under a spell, smiles chasing each other over his lips, and wonder growing grave in his darkening eyes.”

The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

“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. There were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken of them. There were maladies so strange that one had to pass through them if one sought to understand their nature. And, yet, what a great reward one received! How wonderful the whole world became to one! To note the curious hard logic of passion, and the emotional coloured life of the intellect - to observe where they met, and where they separated, at what point they were in unison, and at what point they were discord - there was a delight in that! What matter what the cost was? One could never pay too high a price for any sensation.”

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

“The next day he did not leave the house, and, indeed, spent most of the time in his own room, sick with a wild terror of dying, and yet indifferent to life itself.”

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

“The only thing in the world worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

“There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. In black fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners of the room, and crouch there. Outside, there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills, and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleepers, and yet must needs call forth sleep from their purple cave. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn to the ball, or the letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same, wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness, and the memories of pleasure their pain.”

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde Recommended by Jitske.

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

“Words! Mere words! How terrible 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 a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of the viol or lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?”

The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

“A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”

The Portrait of Mr. W.H., Oscar Wilde

“Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.”

The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Oscar Wilde

“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.”

The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Oscar Wilde Recommended by beck.

“People sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under. To this question there is only one answer. The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all.”

The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Fortnightly Review, Oscar Wilde

“There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People.”

The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Fortnightly Review, Oscar Wilde

“And Beauty is a form of Genius -- is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.”

Youth, Oscar Wilde

“Most of us don't look at things, we look
at aspects of things.”

Eliot Wilder

“So, big surprise, I just stopped smoking
Yeah, la di dah, now don't remind me
I think I'm going insane.”

Stop Smoking, Dar Williams

“'There is no act of evil that cannot be done by a fundamentally good man, Delenn.
'Believe me. I know.'”

A Dark, Distorted Mirror, Gareth Williams

“sorcery of self:
a phrase i coined
and now surrender to you

it's as if i've swallowed
an interior decorator

i like my heart where it is

i cannot make
your past disappear

only rabbits, my love,
only rabbits.”

Said The Shotgun to The Head, Saul Williams

“What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no. It's curved like a road through mountains.”

A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams

“A Plague has stricken the Moths / The Moths are dying, / Their bodies are flakes of Bronze on the carpets lying / Enemies of the delicate Everywhere have / breathed a pestilent mist into the air.”

Lament For The Moths, Tennessee Williams

“Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. We have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. We have never seen a totally sane human being.”

Right Where You Are Sitting Now, Robert Anton Wilson

“Saddest of all are the women who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue. They made the sacrifice, often willingly, and they are still waiting for the blessing.”

Jeanette Winterson

“If you want to know how a mistress marriage works, ask a triangle. In Euclidean geometry the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees and parallel lines never meet. Everyone knows the score, and the women are held in tension, away from one another. The shape is beguiling and it could be understood as a new geometry of family life.

Unfortunately, Euclidean theorems work only if space is flat.

In curved space, the angles over-add themselves and parallel lines always meet.

His wife, his mistress, met.”

Gut Symmetries, Jeanette Winterson

“Walk with me, hand in hand through the neon and styrofoam. Walk the razor blades and the broken hearts. Walk the fortune and the fortune hunted. Walk the chop suey bars and the tract of stars.

I know I am a fool, hoping dirt and glory are both a kind of luminous paint; the humiliations and exaltations that light us up. I see like a bug, everything too large, the pressure of infinity hammering at my head. But how else to live, vertical that I am, pressed down and pressing up simultaneously? I cannot assume you will understand me. It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear. Some story we must have. Stray words on crumpled paper. A weak signal into the outer space of each other.

The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love.”

Gut Symmetries, Jeanette Winterson

“Everyone thinks their own situation is most tragic. I am no exception.”

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson

“Time is a great deadener. People forget, get bored, grow old, go away. There was a time in England when everyone was much concerned with building wooden boats and sailing off against the Turks. When that stopped being interesting, what peasants there were left limped back to the land, and what nobles there were left plotted against each other. Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It's a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it's a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time. Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like a string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more. History should be a hammock for swinging and a game for playing, the way cats play. Claw it, chew it, rearrange it and at bedtime it's still a ball of string full of knots....it's an all-purpose rainy day pursuit, this reducing of stories called history.”

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson