the-picture-of-dorian-gray

I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours.

Yet the roses are not less lovely for all that

There were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken of them. There were maladies so strange that one had to pass through them if one sought to understand their nature.

You told me you had destroyed it.""I was wrong. It has destroyed me.

There were opium-dens, where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.

Dorian, Dorian," she cried, "before I knew you, acting was the one reality of my life. It was only in the theatre that I lived. I thought that it was all true. I was Rosalind one night and Portia the other. The joy of Beatrice was my joy, and the sorrows of Cordelia were mine also. I believed in everything. The common people who acted with me seemed to me to be godlike. The painted scenes were my world. I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real. You came__h, my beautiful love!_ and you freed my soul from prison. You taught me what reality really is. To-night, for the first time in my life, I saw through the hollowness, the sham, the silliness of the empty pageant in which I had always played. To-night, for the first time, I became conscious that the Romeo was hideous, and old, and painted, that the moonlight in the orchard was false, that the scenery was vulgar, and that the words I had to speak were unreal, were not my words, were not what I wanted to say. You had brought me something higher, something of which all art is but a reflection.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.

I asked the question for the best reason possible, for the only reason, indeed, that excuses anyone for asking any question - simple curiosity.

But do let us go. Dorian, you must not stay here any longer. It is not good for one's morals to see bad acting.

He repeated her name over and over again. The birds that were singing in the dew-drenched garden seemed to be telling the flowers about her.

I can now recreate life in a way that was hidden from me, before.'A dream of form in days of thought:

because to influence a person is to give one's own soul.

A line from The Picture of Dorian Gray kept running through my head- a line which, I thought, might have been written by the Devil himself:"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.