the ħive

Some select quotes.

• The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
• All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.
• The good ended happily and the bad―unhappily. That is what fiction is.
• Never speak disrespectfully of society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.
• “How can you sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can’t make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless.”
  “Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get in my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.”
• My dear fellow, the truth isn’t quite the sort of thing one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl. What extraordinary ideas you have about the way to behave to a woman!
• To be natural is such a difficult pose to keep up.
• I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays.
• In any case, she is a monster without being a myth, which is rather unfair.
• “Oh, that’s nonsense, Algy! You never talk anything but nonsense.”
  “Nobody ever does.”
• He was eccentric, I admit. But only in later years. And that was the result of the Indian climate, and marriage, and indigestion, and other things of that kind.
• “Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?”
  “I can, for I feel that you are sure to change.”

Oscar Wilde, 1895