“It lies like a leper in purple, it sits like a dead thing smeared with gold.”

“Look at the moon. How strange the moon seems! She is like a woman rising from a tomb. She is like a dead woman. One might fancy she was looking for dead things.”

“I tremble with pleasure when Ithink that on the very day of my leaving prison both the laburnum andthe lilac will be blooming in the gardens, and that I shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying gold of the one, and make the other tossthe pale purple of its plumes, so that all the air shall be Arabia for me.”

“Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.”

“beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich”

“Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.”

“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.”