Richard Ellmann > Quotes

“Drift beautifully on the surface, and you will die unbeautifully in the depths.”
― Richard Ellmann

“Wilde had to live his life twice over, first in slow motion, then at top speed. During the first period he was a scapegrace, during the second a scapegoat. For the three and a half years he lived after his release from prison, he saw pass before him, mostly in dumb show, a multitude of people he had known earlier, who evaded him.”
― Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde

“we are all malefactors, all in need of forgiveness.”
― Richard Ellmann, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings

“Joyce acquits Blake peremptorily of the charges of insanity and vague mysticism: For the first, 'To say that a great genius is mad, is no better than to say he is a rheumatic or diabetic.' For the second, he was a mystic only insofar as he could be one and remain an artist; his mysticism was no swooning ecstasy like that of St. John of the Cross, but a western mysticism filled with an 'innate sense of form and the coordinating power of the intellect.”
― Richard Ellmann, James Joyce