December 2011
“Of course I should have got rid of you. I should have shaken you out of my life...”
– Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
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“I blame myself without reserve for my weakness. It was merely weakness. One...”
– Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
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“When you could not find me to be with, the companions whom you chose as...”
– Yeah, there’s a reason why a dear dear friend of mine calls De Profundis “the greatest fuck-you letter ever written.”
Suffering is one long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for...
1 tag
“His last days in prison were clouded by two incidents….[one being] the...”
– Ellmann’s biography of Wilde
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“There is a story about Oscar Wilde that, I think, should always be remembered....”
– John Mortimer, Foreword, The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde
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Oscar Wilde’s tales affected his listeners in a number of ways. Sometimes his audiences were stimulated, at others they were enchanted or seduced. The response of Lord Alfred Douglas, who probably heard more of Wilde’s fables than anyone else, allows us to understand something of Wilde’s power and his almost magical influence over his listeners. Douglas remarked that Wilde could...
“The words are indistinguishable though the meaning is plain enough — love,...”
– Virginia Woolf, The String Quartet. (via fuckyeahvirginiawoolf)
“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
– Thomas Merton (Thank you, libraryland)
“I wonder if you knew how I watched,
how I crowded before the spearsmen—
but...”
– H. D., from “Loss“ (via proustitute)
“How well I know that rapture that comes sometimes when one is alone. I think...”
– Katherine Mansfield, from a letter to Ottoline Morrell, 27 December 1921 (via katherine-mansfield)
