dorian gray
my will to write has been absent for quite a while now. i am currently caught up in quite a few matters, and when i get a respite from all this madness i shall make up a suitable entry. for the meanwhile, i present two passages from the first few pages of "the picture of dorian gray" which have made their own individual impressions on me and which i wish to store somewhere for future digestion:
"I thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted, for there is such a little time that your youth will last - such a little time. The common hill-flowers wither, but they blossom again. The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now. In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to."
"Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself."
"I thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted, for there is such a little time that your youth will last - such a little time. The common hill-flowers wither, but they blossom again. The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now. In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to."
"Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself."