Avni’s Reviews > The Picture of Dorian Gray > Status Update

"Yet it was his duty to confess, to suffer public shame, and to make public atonement. There was a God who called upon men to tell their sins to earth as well as to heaven. Nothing that he could do would cleanse him till he had told his own sin. His sin?"

Life is not governed by will or intention.Life is a question of nerves,and fibres,and slowly-built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams.You may fancy yourself safe,and think yourself strong.But..a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings strange memories with it,a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again...it is on things like these that our lives depend

"Youth! There is nothing like it. It’s absurd to talk of the ignorance of youth. The only people whose opinions I listen to now with any respect are people much younger than myself. They seem in front of me. Life has revealed to them her last wonder."

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, & gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses. But this was not one of them. It was... to be driven out of the mind, to be drugged with poppies, to be strangled lest it might strangle one itself.

"There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful."

"...it seemed ...that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life... as his imagination had created it for him, as it had been in his brain and in his passions. He felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvelous and evil so full of wonder. It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own."

"He used to wonder at the shallow psychology of those who conceive the Ego in man as a thing simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence. To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead."

"For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays charming. Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities."

"On his return he would sit in front of the picture, sometimes loathing it and himself, but filled, at other times, with that pride of rebellion that is half the fascination of sin, and smiling, with secret pleasure, at the misshapen shadow that had to bear the burden that should have been his own."

"Summer followed summer, and the yellow jonquils bloomed and died many times, and nights of horror repeated the story of their shame, but he was unchanged. No winter marred his face or stained his flower-like bloom."