Jane > Jane's Quotes

“Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Somehow I sensed what was coming for me even then. Really, though, what girl doesn’t? It looms over you, that threat of violence. They drill the danger into your head until it starts to feel inevitable. You grow up wondering when it’s finally going to happen.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“Hey, Hachi
People always say that you only discover how precious something is after you lose it--- but I think, you only really recognize it... when you see it a second time face to face.
-Nana Osaki”
― Ai Yazawa

“People will risk everything for a little bit of something beautiful.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“You must have a cigarette. A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“But then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“To define is to limit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Some things are more precious because they don't last long.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The basis of optimism is sheer terror.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I am tired of myself tonight. I should like to be somebody else.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I know what pleasure is", cried Dorian. "It is to adore someone.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Love is a more wonderful thing than art.'
'They are both simply forms of imitation,' remarked Lord Henry.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“He grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.”
― Oscar Wilde

“if she had ordered me to throw myself down then, I would have done it! If she had said it only as a joke, said it with contempt, spitting on me--even then I would have jumped!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Gambler

“Do you know that one day I'll kill you? I won't do it because I'm no longer in love with you, or because I'm jealous, but—I'll just kill you for no better reason that I sometimes long to devour you.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Gambler

“People really do like seeing their best friends humiliated; a large part of the friendship is based on humiliation; and that is an old truth,well known to all intelligent people.”
― Fyodor M. Dostoevsky, The Gambler

“If Iona's heart were to burst and his misery to flow out, it would flood the whole world, it seems, but yet it is not seen. It has found a hiding-place in such an insignificant shell that one would not have found it with a candle by daylight....”
― Anton Chekhov, Misery

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“A sick man's dreams are often extraordinarily distinct and vivid and extremely life-like. A scene may be composed of the most unnatural and incongruous elements, but the setting and presentation are so plausible, the details so subtle, so unexpected, so artistically in harmony with the whole picture, that the dreamer could not invent them for himself in his waking state, even if he were an artist like Pushkin or Turgenev. Such morbid dreams always make a strong impression on the dreamer's already disturbed and excited nerves, and are remembered for a long time.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Poetry: the best words in the best order.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“People are so like their first mother Eve: what they are given doesn't take their fancy. The serpent is forever enticing them to come to him, to the tree of mystery. They must have the forbidden fruit, or paradise will not be paradise for them.”
― Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin