Miscellaneous Quotations U-Z
"The langour of Youth - how unique and quintessential
it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the
generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes
of Youth - all save this - come and go with us through life. These
things are a part of life itself; but langour - the relaxation of yet
unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding - that belongs to Youth alone
and dies with it."
Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
(Harmondsworth 1962, p.94).
"She sang, of course, "M'ama!" and not
"he loves me," since an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical
world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should
be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking
audiences."
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
(London 1974, p.24).
"'[...] new and crazy social
schemes [...] interest me more than the blind conformity to
tradition - somebody else's tradition - that I see among our own friends.
It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy
of another country.'"
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
(London 1974, p.201).
"'I never could stomach these nationalists,'
he exclaimed. 'The destiny of Man is to unite, not to divide. If
you keep on dividing you end up as a collection of monkeys throwing nuts
at each other out of separate trees.'"
T.H. White, The Once and Future
King (London 1987, p.227).
Lord Goring: "To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance"
Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband, III.
"'[...] But beauty, real beauty,
ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a
mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment
one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something
horrid.'"
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford 1981, p.3).
"'[...] I have grown to love secrecy.
It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous
to us.'"
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford 1981, p.4).
"'[...] The thoroughly well-informed
man - that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed
man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-à-brac shop, all monsters and
dust, with everything priced above its proper value.'"
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford 1981, p.12).
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford 1981, p.18).
"Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How
clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what
a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic
form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that
of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?"
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford 1981, p.19).
"'Nothing can cure the soul but the senses,
just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.'"
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford 1981, p.20).
"'Nowadays people know the price of everything,
and the value of nothing.'"
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford 1981, p.46).
"Children begin by loving their parents; as they
grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford 1981, p.66).
"'When we are happy we are always good, but
when we are good we are not always happy.'"
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford 1981, p.77).
"There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we
blame ourselves we feel that no one else has a right to blame us."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford 1981, p.95/96).
"'The tragedy of old age is not that one is old,
but that one is young.'"
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford 1981, p.216).
"'Every journey conceals another journey
within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle.'"
Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry (London 1990, p.9).
"'I have set off and found that there is
no end to even the simplest journey of the mind. I begin, and straight
away a hundred alternative routes present themselves. I choose one, no
sooner begin, than a hundred more appear.'"
Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry (London 1990, p.102).
"Why, if one wants to compare life to anything,
one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour
- landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot
out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the
asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the
post-office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse.
Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and
repair; all so casual, all so haphazard ..."
Virginia Woolf, 'The Mark on the
Wall', in: The Second Book of English Short Stories (Harmondsworth 1972, p.143).
"'[...] life is pleasant, life
is tolerable. Tuesday follows Monday, then comes Wednesday. The mind grows
rings;the identity becomes robust; pain is absorbed in growth.
Opening and shutting, shutting and opening, with an increasing hum and
sturdiness, the haste and fever of youth are drawn into service until
the whole being seems to expand in and out like the mainspring of a clock.
How fast the stream flows from January to December! We are swept
on by the torrent of things grown so familiar that they cast no shadow.
We float, we float ...'"
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
(Harmondsworth 1992, p.198).