Bosie Douglas Quotes

“WILDE: Oh — Bosie! (He weeps.) I have to go back to him, you know. Robbie will be furious but it can't be helped. The betrayal of one's friends is a bagatelle in the stakes of love, but the betrayal of oneself is a lifelong regret. Bosie is what became of me. He is spoiled, vindictive, utterly selfish and not very talented, but these are merely the facts. The truth is he was Hyacinth when Apollo loved him, he is ivory and gold, from his red rose-leaf lips comes music that fills me with joy, he is the only one who understands me. 'Even as a teething child throbs with ferment, so does the soul of him who gazes upon the boy's beauty; he can neither sleep at night nor keep still by day,' and a lot more besides, but before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself. Then we saw what we had made — the piece of ice in the fist you cannot hold or let go. (He weeps.)”
― Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

“In your case, one as either to give up to you or give you up. There was no other alternative.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“In life there is really no small or great thing. All things are of equal value and of equal size.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis and Other Writings

“In you Hate was always stronger than Love...You did not realize that there is no room for both passions in the same soul. They cannot live together in that fair carven house. Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see Life as a whole; by which, and by which alone, we can understand others in their real as in their ideal relations. Only what is fine, and finely conceived, can feed Love. But anything will feed Hate. There was no glass of champagne you drank, not a rich dish you ate of in all those years that did not feed your Hate and make it fat...Hate so blinded you that you could see no further than the narrow, walled-in, and already lust-withered garden of your common desires.”
― Oscar Wilde