“For life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce.”

“There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make one almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie.”

“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.”

“Poor Aubrey: I hope he will get all right. He brought a strangely new personality to English art, and was a master in his way of fantastic grace, and the charm of the unreal. His muse had moods of terrible laughter. Behind his grotesques there seemed to lurk some curious philosophy…”

“I felt that this grey, monstrous London of ours, with its myriads of people, its sordid sinners and its splendid sins”

“The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination,made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain,danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks.”

“Society takes upon itself the right to inflictappalling punishment on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice ofshallowness, and fails to realise what it has done. When the man’s punishmentis over, it leaves him to himself; that is to say, it abandons him at thevery moment when its highest duty towards him begins. It is really ashamedof its own actions, and shuns those whom it has punished, as people shun acreditor whose debt they cannot pay, or one on whom they have inflictedan irreparable, an irremediable wrong.”