Every American bride is taken there [Niagara Falls], and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life.
LADY STUTFIELD I adore silent men. MRS ALLONBY Oh, Ernest isn't silent. He talks the whole time. But he has got no conversation. What he talks about I don't know. I haven't listened to him for years.
Yes, very sensible... People die of common sense, Dorian, one lost moment at a time. Life is a moment. There is no hereafter. So make it burn always with the hardest flame.
A man is called affected, nowadays, if he dresses as he likes to dress. But in doing that he is acting in a perfectly natural manner. Affectation, in such matters, consists in dressing according to the views of one's neighbour, whose views, as they are the views of the majority, will probably be extremely stupid.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. MRS ALLONBY: And the body is born young and grows old. That is life's tragedy.
I forget what killed it. I think it was her proposing to sacrifice the whole world for me. That is always a dreadful moment. It fills one with the terror of eternity.
Lord Darlington (LD): I think life too complex a thing to be settled by these hard and fast rules. Lady Windemere (LW): If we had 'hard-and-fast rules' we would find life much simpler. LD: You allow of no exceptions? LW: None! LD: Ah, what a fascinating Puritan you are, LW. LW: The adjective was unnecessary, LD.
Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world. I cannot conceive of any other explanation. I am convinced that there is no other, and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. Pleasure for the beautiful body, but pain for the beautiful soul.