Status Updates From The Importance Of Being Ear...

Gwendolen. [Superciliously.] No, thank you. Sugar is not fashionable any more. [Cecily looks angrily at her, takes up the tongs and puts four lumps of sugar into the cup.]
Cecily. [Severely.] Cake or bread and butter?
Gwendolen. Bread and butter, please. Cake is rarely seen at the best houses nowadays.
Cecily. [Cuts a very large slice of cake, and puts it on the tray.] Hand that to Miss Fairfax.

Gwendolen. [With elaborate politeness.] Thank you. [Aside.] Detestable girl! But I require tea!

Cecily. What an impetuous boy he is! I like his hair so much. I must enter his proposal in my diary.

Algernon. But why on earth did you break it off? What had I done? I had done nothing at all. Cecily, I am very much hurt indeed to hear you broke it off. Particularly when the weather was so charming.

Cecily. It would hardly have been a really serious engagement if it hadn’t been broken off at least once. But I forgave you before the week was out.

Algernon. [Speaking very rapidly.] Cecily, ever since I first looked upon your wonderful and incomparable beauty, I have dared to love you wildly, passionately, devotedly, hopelessly.

Cecily. I don’t think that you should tell me that you love me wildly, passionately, devotedly, hopelessly. Hopelessly doesn’t seem to make much sense, does it?

Algernon. Cecily!

Algernon. Do you really keep a diary? I’d give anything to look at it. May I?

Cecily. Oh no. [Puts her hand over it.] You see, it is simply a very young girl’s record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication. When it appears in volume form I hope you will order a copy.

Jack. Well, will you go if I change my clothes?

Algernon. Yes, if you are not too long. I never saw anybody take so long to dress, and with such little result.

Jack. Well, at any rate, that is better than being always over-dressed as you are.

Algernon. If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.

Algernon. Well, Cecily is a darling.

Jack. You are not to talk of Miss Cardew like that. I don’t like it.

Algernon. Well, I don’t like your clothes. You look perfectly ridiculous in them.

Cecily. Miss Prism says that all good looks are a snare.

Algernon. They are a snare that every sensible man would like to be caught in.

Cecily. Oh, I don’t think I would care to catch a sensible man. I shouldn’t know what to talk to him about.

Cecily. I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life. If I didn’t write them down, I should probably forget all about them.

Miss Prism. Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about with us.

Cecily. Yes, but it usually chronicles the things that have never happened, and couldn’t possibly have happened.

I am not in favour of this modern mania for turning bad people into good people at a moment’s notice. As a man sows so let him reap.

Miss Prism. Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about with us.

Cecily. Yes, but it usually chronicles the things that have never happened, and couldn’t possibly have happened. I believe that Memory is responsible for nearly all the three-volume novels that Mudie sends us.

Dear Uncle Jack is so very serious! Sometimes he is so serious that I think he cannot be quite well.

Lane. Yes, sir. [Handing sherry.]

Algernon. I hope to-morrow will be a fine day, Lane.

Lane. It never is, sir.

Algernon. Lane, you’re a perfect pessimist.

Lane. I do my best to give satisfaction, sir.

Do you know it is nearly seven?

Jack. [Irritably.] Oh! It always is nearly seven.

I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. You can’t go anywhere without meeting clever people.

The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever.

Jack. That, my dear young friend, is the theory that the corrupt French Drama has been propounding for the last fifty years.

Algernon. Yes; and that the happy English home has proved in half the time.

Jack. For heaven’s sake, don’t try to be cynical. It’s perfectly easy to be cynical.

Algernon. My dear fellow, it isn’t easy to be anything nowadays. There’s such a lot of beastly competition about.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.