More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
You only taught me to be vain.
Her death has all the pathetic uselessness of martyrdom, all its wasted beauty. But, as I was saying, you must not think I have not suffered.
“what have you told me? Simply that you felt that you admired me too much.
you mustn’t talk about worship. It is foolish. You and I are friends, Basil, and we must always remain so.
There is something fatal about a portrait. It has a life of its own. I will come and have tea with you.
how strange it was that, instead of having been forced to reveal his own secret, he had succeeded, almost by chance, in wresting a secret from his friend!
The love that he bore him—for it was really love—had nothing in it that was not noble and intellectual. It was not that mere physical admiration of beauty that is born of the senses and that dies when the senses tire.
Why should he watch the hideous corruption of his soul? He kept his youth—that was enough.
It was a novel without a plot and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own,
“I didn’t say I liked it, Harry. I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference.”
“I don’t wish to know anything about them. I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself don’t interest me. They have not got the charm of novelty.”
They say that you corrupt every one with whom you become intimate, and that it is quite sufficient for you to enter a house for shame of some kind to follow after.
kind. Know you? I wonder do I know you? Before I could answer that, I should have to see your soul.”
you met me, flattered me, and taught me to be vain of my good looks. One day you introduced me to a friend of yours, who explained to me the wonder of youth,
and you finished a portrait of me that revealed to me the wonder of beauty. In a mad moment that, even now, I don’t know whether I regret or not, I made a wish, perhaps you would call it a prayer
“As you called it.”
“Each of us has heaven and hell in him, Basil,
But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.
“That awful thing, a woman’s memory!”
You are mad, Dorian.
When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.”
“A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.”
I like men who have a future and women who have a past,
“I am sick of women who love one. Women who hate one are much more interesting.
“I have never searched for happiness. Who wants happiness? I have searched for pleasure.”
“I am on the side of the Trojans. They fought for a woman.”
He remembered how pleased he used to be when he was pointed out, or stared at, or talked about. He was tired of hearing his own name now.
“The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.”
It was the living death of his own soul that troubled him.
