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

“life is a question of nerves… in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams... a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play… it is on things like these that our lives depend.” 207

“youth! there is nothing like it. it's absurd to talk of the ignorance of youth… they seem in front of me. life has revealed to them her latest wonder.” 206

“there are moments when the odour of lilas blanc passes suddenly across me, and i have to live the strangest month of my life over again… life has been your art. you have set yourself to music. your days are your sonnets.” 207

“by the way, dorian, what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”

“i thought of telling the prophet that Art had a soul, but that man had not. i am afraid, however, he would not have understood me.”

“the soul is a terrible reality. it can be bought, and sold, and bartered away. it can be poisoned, or made perfect. there is a soul in each one of us. i know it.”

205

“nothing seems to us changed. out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known.” 127

“it is the face of my soul.” 150

“but youth smiles without any reason. it is one of its chiefest charms.” 155

“he glanced at his own white taper fingers, shuddering slightly in spite of himself, and passed on, till he came to those lovely stances up one Venice:” 157

“a wild longing, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed… the past would have little or no place, or survive, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness, and the memories of pleasure their pain.” 127

“it was such love as Michael Angelo had known, and Montaigne, and Winckelmann, and Shakespeare himself. yes, basil could have saved him. but it was too late now. the past could always be annihilated. regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. but the future was inevitable. there were passions in him that would find their terrible outlet, dreams that would make the shadow of their real evil.” 115

“to become the spectator of one's own life, as harry says, is to escape the suffering of life.” 107

“dorian, from the moment i met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. i was dominated, soul, brain, and power by you. you became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.” 110

“you are more to me than all art can ever be.” 84

“women were better suited to bear sorrow than men. they lived on their emotions. they only thought of their emotions. when they took lovers, it was merely to have someone with whom they could have scenes.” 89

“i don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. i want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.” 105

“It seemed to me that all my life had been narrowed to one perfect point of rose-coloured joy.” 74

“pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval. when we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy.” 76

“they create Love in our natures. they have a right to demand it back… women give to men the very gold of their lives.” 77

“people like you—the wilful sunbeams of life” 51

“his nature had developed like a flower, had borne blossoms of scarlet flame. out of its secret hiding-place had crept his Soul, and Desire had come to meet it on the way.” 53

“i want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. i want a breath of our passion to stir their dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain.” 54