Oscar Wilde Quotes

I have been enlightened. I have fallen into poetry and it has swallowed me up.

I think it's such a clever idea, that you fall in love when you're 16, and then you have this fantasy about that person for the rest of your life.

She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all the poetry books.

Maybe all young men who love us become knights in shining armor when we love them back.

The lover never sees personal resemblances in his mistress to her kindred or to others. His friends find in her a likeness to hermother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds.

It's the great male fantasy-all it takes is one dance to know that she's the one. All it takes is the sound of her song from the tower, or a look at her sleeping face. And right away you know-this is the girl in your head, sleeping or dancing or singing in front of you. Yes, girls want princes, but boys want their princesses just as much.

No woman allows her lover to descend from his pedestal. Even a god is not forgiven the slightest pettiness.

I’ve been thinking I’d like to be Daisy; I’d like to have someone like Gatsby stare at my house for whole years and never stop dreaming of me

I read and I read; and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.

Woman's love -- a mirror in which a man beholds himself glorified, magnified and deified.

Coldplay songs deliver an amorphous, irrefutable interpretation of how being in love is supposed to feel, and people find themselves wanting that feeling for real. They want men to adore them like Lloyd Dobler would, and they want women to think like Aimee Mann, and they expect all their arguments to sound like Sam Malone and Diane Chambers. They think everything will work out perfectly in the end (just like it did for Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones and Nick Hornby's Rob Fleming), and they don't stop believing because Journey's Steve Perry insists we should never do that.

There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few prosy nothings.

They say that when you’re really in love, the world becomes gossamer and gorgeous, but in my experience the world gets grimy, and the love object is in stark relief from the surroundings. This is love, a pretty thing on an ugly street.

I walk with Federico Garcia Lorca around the Upper West Side in Manhattan because that was a neighborhood he lived in and I imagine walking around Paris with Cesar Vallejo, a great Peruvian poet who lived in Paris. And I kind of create the walk as a kind of drama of my apprenticeship.

Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels The dizzy dancing way you feel As every fairy tale comes real I've looked at love that way.

2 Guys in a health club, one is putting on pantyhose. "Since when do you wear pantyhose?" "Since my wife found it in the glove compartment!"

I've never been in love, but I've always imagined it--weirdly--like some sort of OxiClean commercial. The TV host shows a scene from an ordinary day, and then takes a big old sponge soaked in love and swipes away the stains. Suddenly that same scene is missing all the mistakes, all the loneliness. The colors are like jewels, ten times richer than they were before. The music is louder and clearer. "Love," the host will say, "makes life a little brighter.

London perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play and a story and a poem, without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets... To walk alone through London is the greatest rest.

Not to admire, is all the art I know To make men happy, or to keep them so. Thus Horace wrote we all know long ago; And thus Pope quotes the precept to re-teach From his translation; but had none admired, Would Pope have sung, or Horace been inspired?

That's your problem! You don't want to be in love. You want to be in love in a movie.

By poeticizing love, we imagine in those we love virtues that they often do not possess; this then becomes the source of constant mistakes and constant distress.

SHE is neither pink nor pale, And she never will be all mine; She learned her hands in a fairy-tale, And her mouth on a valentine. She has more hair than she needs; In the sun ’tis a woe to me! And her voice is a string of colored beads, Or steps leading into the sea. She loves me all that she can, And her ways to my ways resign; But she was not made for any man, And she never will be all mine.

He always seemed to women different from what he was, and they loved in him not himself, but the man created by their imagination, whom they had been eagerly seeking all their lives; and afterwards, when they noticed their mistake, they loved him all the same.

In novels, I said, people are transfigured by love. They’re elevated, made different, lifted out of their ordinariness…It’s not so much to ask, I said. I just want love to live up to its publicity.