catching up on another of those classics that I missed out on somewhere along the way. Made me want to know more about Oscar's life after prison. Did he write anything worth remembering once he 'found humility'?

“No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.
Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.
Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.
From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type.
All art is at once surface and symbol.
Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
Those who read the symbol do so at their
peril.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.
When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.”

The amount of quotes I have highlighted within 741 pages is by no means enough. If I could highlight everything, I would.

I cannot tell you how many times I have read, “The Picture of Dorian Gray” for it is in my opinion one of the best stories ever told. And my Mother described his writing as “literary crème brûlée!” You will find no part of me in disagreement.

Yet, what struck me most was in “De Profundis” the end of his non-fictional letter to someone who betrayed him. To which it emotionally destroyed me in the best possible way. Sitting in public with my eyes closed just to feel it all. “I am, yet from me you may have still much to gain.
You came to me to learn the Pleasure of Life and the Pleasure of Art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sor-row, and its beauty.” For how often we look at what others teach us instead of what we teach us.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

A witty producer of bold claims and questionable remarks.
[1854-1900, Ireland, France]

Favourites:
The Critic As An Artist
"Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world."
The Picture of Dorian Gray
"I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit."
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
"Yet each man kills the thing he loves"

Most of this stuff was pretty silly, meager structures to hang witticisms on. The two exceptions were Salome, a very strange sort of dream, and De Profundis, a pained work of genius. Wilde's opus on the suffering of love, a force he can recognize, criticize, epigrammatize, yet cannot control, has to be the greatest thing he ever wrote.

Enjoyed every page, poem, essay and excerpt, letter, phrase, philosophy, and play (despite the punny corniness and contrived coincidences of The Importance of Being Earnest), and novel (The Picture of Dorian Gray).