Picture Perfect
“Brevity is the soul of wit”, wrote William Shakespeare in Hamlet. It is also one of the key elements in making quotations…well…quotable. A quote is the literary equivalent of the 10-second sound bite. It has to be quick and, yes, it has to bite. If properly delivered, few get the chance to bite back.
So before I leave Oscar Wilde behind (ref: Wilde Thing), I wanted to list my top 10 quotes from The Picture of Dorian Gray. The best lines with the most bite come from Wilde’s on-page proxy, Lord Henry Wotton. It is he who influences Dorian Gray to make his Faustian pact and become, in the process, a mere echo of Lord Henry’s music. No wonder; the tone and pitch of this music are compelling.
10. Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for friendship and it is by far the best ending for one.
9. There are many things we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.
8. American girls are as clever at concealing their parents as English women are at concealing their past.
7. I always like to know everything about my new friends and nothing about my old ones.
6. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.
5. They have been through the fire, and what fire does not destroy, it hardens.
4. The value of an idea has nothing to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it.
3. Young men want to be faithful and are not; old men want to be faithless and cannot.
2. I like men who have a future and women who have a past.
1. The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.
Wilde’s descriptive powers apply not just to the human condition, but to its physical manifestations as well…especially, it seems when those manifestations are of women. And so, as an added bonus, I am listing five wonderfully evocative descriptions, also from Dorian Gray:
1. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead.
2. (Her) dresses always looked if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest.
3. Elderly ladies with gigantic tiaras and parrot noses.
4. There was something of the fawn in her shy grace and startled eyes.
5. A dowdy dull girl with one of those characteristic British faces that, once seen, are never remembered.
Okay, now I can move on.
