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"Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose."
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"Some books sold because they are (said to be) great. Some are (said to be) great because they sold."
"This would be...a book that would be a trapdoor down into some place dark. A place only you could go, alone, when you opened the cover. Because only books have that power."
"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author."
"No, said Bran. "I haven't. And if I have it doesn't matter. Sometimes Old Nan would tell the same story she'd told before, but we never minded, if it was a good story. Old stories are like old friends, she used to say. You have to visit them from time to time."
"Like someone excitedly relating a story, only to find the words petering out, the path gets narrower the further I go, the undergrowth taking over."
"Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
"For what was it about books that once finished left the reader in a bit of a haze and made them reread the last few sentences in order to continue the ringing in their hearts a while longer, so as not to let the silence illumine the fact that reading, they had gained something - distance, a lesson, a companion, a new world - but now, after the last full stop, they had lost something palpable and felt a little emptier than before."
"Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless."
"In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself."
"Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real. But it is true."
Explore more quotes by Oscar Wilde
"Well, in the first place girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don't think it right."
"What a silly thing love is!' said the student as he walked away. 'It is not half as useful as logic, for it does not prove anything, and it is always telling one of things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true. In fact, it is quite unpractical, and, as in this age to be practical is everything, I shall go back to philosophy and study metaphysics.' So he returned to his room and pulled out a great dusty book, and began to read."
"I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect."
"The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass."
"You silly Arthur! If you knew anything about...anything, which you don't, you would know that I adore you. Everyone in London knows it except you. It is a public scandal the way I adore you. I have been going about for the last six months telling the whole of society that I adore you. I wonder you consent to have anything to say to me. I have no character left at all. At least, I feel so happy that I am quite sure I have no character left at all."
"Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves and fibers and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams."
"Nobody is worthy to be loved. The fact that God loves man shows us that in the divine order of ideal things it is written that eternal love is to be given to what is eternally unworthy. Or if that phrase seems to be a bitter one to bear, let us say that everybody is worthy of love, except him who thinks he is."
"If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized."
"As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame."
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