kat

‘Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. You may fancy yourself safe, and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play - I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.’

‘…each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved.’

‘He was trying to gather up the scarlet threads of life, and to weave them into a pattern; to find his way through the sanguine labyrinth of passion through which he was wandering.’

‘There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathize with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores the better.’

‘Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. (…) Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?’

‘Let me think. Or, rather, let me try not to think.’

“so, you can’t live without me?”

‘I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir their dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain.’

‘Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.’

‘I thought you would never care for anything but your art.’

‘… and as for believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.’

“When I like people immensely I never tell their names to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. […] It is a silly habit, I dare say, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one’s life.”