“The essential power of imagination, the quality of spirit, is the power of making fictions and making sense of life by that means. Fiction is the most available form of freedom, freedom of feeling and action.” – Denis Donoghue, The Sovereign Ghost
“There should be a day in every year when consciousness allows itself to be suspended by fact in a Mardi Gras of mere reality.” – Denis Donoghue, The Sovereign Ghost
“The sick do not ask if the hand that smooths their pillow is pure, nor the dying care if the lips that touch their brow have known the kiss of sin.” – Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance
“Men marry because they are tired; women because they are curious. Both are disappointed.” – Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance
“If you want to know what a woman really means—which, by the way, is always a dangerous thing to do—look at her, don’t listen to her.” – Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance
“There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to Life. The old are in life’s lumber-room. But youth is the Lord of Life. Youth has a kingdom waiting for it.” – Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance
“Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.” – Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance
“When a man is old enough to do wrong he should be old enough to do right also.” – Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance
“After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations.” – Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance
“The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. And the body is born young and grows old. That is life’s tragedy.” – Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance
“Nothing is serious except passion. The intellect is not a serious thing, and never has been. It is an instrument on which one plays, that is all.” – Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance
“All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.” – Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
“The richest freedom is that which finds its limits within itself, a sense of decorum not imposed but acknowledged.” – Denis Donoghue, The Sovereign Ghost
“The true business of literature, as of all intellect, critical or creative, is to remind the powers that be, simple and corrupt as they are, of the turbulence they have to control.” – R. P. Blackmur, The Lion and the Honeycomb
“The politics of existing states is always too simple for literature; it is good only to aggravate literature.” – R. P. Blackmur, The Lion and the Honeycomb (emphasis in original)
“The ideal prince is a man of learning, eloquence, and wisdom, dedicated to civil order and justice.” – Denis Donoghue, The Ordinary Universe
“Some men and women, indeed, there are who can live on smiles and the word ‘yes’ forever. But for others (indeed for most) this is too tepid and relaxed a moral climate. Passive happiness is slack and insipid, and soon grows mawkish and intolerable. Some austerity and wintry negativity, some roughness, danger, stringency, and effort, some ‘no! no!’ must be mixed in, to produce the sense of an existence with character and texture and power.” – William James, Varieties of Religious Experience
“There is the same world for all of us, and good and evil, sin and innocence, go through it hand in hand. To shut one’s eyes to half of life that one may live securely is as though one blinded oneself that one might walk with more safety in a land of pit and precipice.” – Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan
“In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.” – Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan
“Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.” – Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan
“There are books to which one listens in silence, and other books with which one argues all the time.” – Denis Donoghue, The Ordinary Universe
“Consciousness when it doesn’t clearly understand what to live for, what to die for, can only abuse and ridicule itself.” – Saul Bellow, Herzog
“We have been conscious for centuries, and look, we have not come through. The quality of our consciousness is wrong, to begin with. We need the consciousness of appreciation, not the consciousness of possession; the open hand, not the grip of claw.” – Denis Donoghue, The Ordinary Universe
“Love is wiser than Philosophy, though she is wise, and mightier than Power, though he is mighty.” – Oscar Wilde, “The Nightingale and the Rose”
“None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realise it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self for ever.” – Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night
“To reconcile the demands of the imagination with the impositions of the world is a delicate exercise; especially if the natural idiom of the imagination is a language of freedom, mobility, and range, and the idiom of the world is, for the most part, deception and abuse.” – Denis Donoghue, The Ordinary Universe
“Reverence for life involves saying ‘yes’ to the human situation, limited and finite as it is; it disposes us to respect persons, to value them, to find the human predicament full of hazard and therefore full of significance; to find that moral choice is important and that life is possibility if not promise.” – Denis Donoghue, The Ordinary Universe
“If the spaces of life are occupied by generous perception, there is less room for masty things; belligerence, bravado, cruelty, condescension.” – Denis Donoghue, The Ordinary Universe
“That which checks all the police forces of avoidance is, if I can put it thus, avoidance itself. There are, for example, what are called ‘publications’: one can fail to know them, this is always possible in a given context; but one can arrange things, in a certain milieu, in order to avoid knowing that they exist; one can also, knowing of their existence, avoid reading them; one can read while avoiding ‘understanding’; one can, understanding, avoid being affected by them or using them; one can also, using them, avoid referring to them; but one can further, referring to them, enclose them, contain them, exclude them, and therefore avoid them better than ever, etc. But what is to be thought of the fact that one cannot avoid avoiding, of inevitable avoidance in all its forms—rejection, foreclusion, denegation, incorporation, and even introjective and idealizing assimilation of the other at the limit of incorporation—?” – Jacques Derrida, The Post Card (trans. Alan Bass)
“Every human formation has as its essence, and not for accidental purposes, the restraining of pleasure.” – Jacques Lacan (quoted by Jacques Derrida in The Post Card (trans. Alan Bass))