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

‘The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.’

'If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart.’

"I am on the side of the Trojans. They fought for a woman.”
"They were defeated.”
"There are worse things than capture”, she answered.

‘Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words.
That is the reason I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.'

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“Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book. There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realise his conception of the beautiful.”

‘There is something to me quite beautiful about her death (*suicide). I am glad I am living in a century when such wonders happen. They make one believe in the reality of the things we all play with, such as romance, passion, and love.'
What do you mean Henry? Dorian fell in love with an imitation of reality which is ultimately unrealistic, mistaking the performance of love for love itself.

-‘There were maladies so strange that one had to pass through them if one sought to understand their nature.’

‘As one watched life in its crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain, and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams. There were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken of them.’

‘Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one'self over poetry is an honour.’

‘When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.’