The Picture of Dorian Gray: Chapters 5-8

Thin-lipped wisdom spoke at her from the worn chair, hinted at prudence, quoted from that book of cowardice whose author apes the name of common sense.

Against the shell of her ear broke the waves of worldly cunning.

She felt sure that the tableau was interesting.

"You pain me, my son. I trust you will return from Australia in a position of affluence. I believe there is no society of any kind in the Colonies—nothing that I would call society—so when you have made your fortune, you must come back and assert yourself in London."

"You must remember that it is your own choice. You might have entered a solicitor's office. Solicitors are a very respectable class, and in the country often dine with the best families."

"No," answered his mother with a placid expression in her face.

Yet it was not this alone that made him gloomy and morose.

Poor dreadful Mr. Isaacs will be shouting 'genius' to his loafers at the bar. He has preached me as a dogma; to-night he will announce me as a revelation.

He followed her doggedly as she passed through the crowd.

At the Marble Arch they hailed an omnibus, which left them close to their shabby home in the Euston Road.

Leaden with fear, his mother watched him.

The exaggerated folly of the threat, the passionate gesture that accompanied it, the mad melodramatic words, made life seem more vivid to her.

The lodging-house drudge bustled in and out.

You are quite incorrigible, Harry; but I don't mind. It is impossible to be angry with you.

What is marriage? An irrevocable vow. You mock at it for that. Ah! don't mock. It is an irrevocable vow that I want to take.

Through the crowd of ungainly, shabbily dressed actors, Sibyl Vane moved like a creature from a finer world.

The beautiful passage...was declaimed with the painful precision of a schoolgirl who has been taught to recite by some second-rate professor of elocution.

"But she seems to me to be simply callous and cold. She has entirely altered. Last night she was a great artist. This evening she is merely a commonplace mediocre actress."

He remembered wandering through dimly lit streets, past gaunt, black-shadowed archways and evil-looking houses.

The air was heavy with the perfume of the flowers, and their beauty seemed to bring him an anodyne for his pain.

Under the portico, with its grey, sun-bleached pillars, loitered a troop of draggled bareheaded girls, waiting for the auction to be over.

The heavy cart-horses slipped and stamped upon the rough stones, shaking their bells and trappings.

The quivering ardent sunlight showed him the lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he had been looking into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing.

The screen was an old one, of gilt Spanish leather, stamped and wrought with a rather florid Louis-Quatorze pattern.

Was there some subtle affinity between the chemical atoms that shaped themselves into form and colour on the canvas and the soul that was within him?

It was not too late to make reparation for that.

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.

It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

"Your letter? Oh, yes, I remember. I have not read it yet, Harry. I was afraid there might be something in it that I wouldn't like. You cut life to pieces with your epigrams."

There will have to be an inquest, of course, and you must not be mixed up in it.

I say nothing about the social mistake, which would have been abject—which, of course, I would not have allowed—but I assure you that in any case the whole thing would have been an absolute failure.

They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak.

That awful memory of woman! What a fearful thing it is! And what an utter intellectual stagnation it reveals! One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details.

If they were allowed their own way, every comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would culminate in a farce.

If they were allowed their own way, every comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would culminate in a farce.

Never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons.

They flaunt their conjugal felicity in one's face, as if it were the most fascinating of sins.

They flaunt their conjugal felicity in one's face, as if it were the most fascinating of sins.

But you must think of that lonely death in the tawdry dressing-room simply as a strange lurid fragment from some Jacobean tragedy, as a wonderful scene from Webster, or Ford, or Cyril Tourneur.

"But suppose, Harry, I became haggard, and old, and wrinkled? What then?"

Did it merely take cognizance of what passed within the soul?

She had atoned for everything by the sacrifice she had made of her life.

Tears came to his eyes as he remembered her childlike look, and winsome fanciful ways, and shy tremulous grace.

Once, in boyish mockery of Narcissus, he had kissed, or feigned to kiss, those painted lips that now smiled so cruelly at him.

And yet, who, that knew anything about life, would surrender the chance of remaining always young, however fantastic that chance might be, or with what fateful consequences it might be fraught?