“It's never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools.”

“There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.”

“Ah darling, goodness, I think, never brought any one out. Goodness, when it's real, precisely, rather keeps people IN.”

“...there was always a sort of tacit understanding among women, born of the solidarity of the sex, that they should discover or invent lovers for each other...”

“[...] under the guise of caring only for intrinsic values Osmond lived exclusively for the world. Far from being its master as he pretended to be, he was its very humble servant, and the degree of its attention was his only measure of success. He lived with his eye on it from morning till night, and the world was so stupid it never suspected the trick. Everything he did was pose—pose so subtly considered that if one were not on the lookout one mistook it for impulse. Ralph had never met a man who lived so much in the land of consideration.”

“He had thought, no doubt, from the day he was born, much more than he had acted; except indeed that he remembered thoughts--a few of them--which at the moment of their coming to him had thrilled him almost like adventures.”

“The whole of anything, is never told.”