Wilde was not a great poet nor a consummate prose writer. He was a very astute Irishman who encompassed in epigrams an esthetic credo which others before him scattered in the space of long pages. He was an enfant terrible.

Gibbon observes that in the Arabian book par excellence, in the Koran, there are no camels; I believe if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Kor…

That one individual should awaken in another memories that belong to still a third is an obvious paradox.

If the pages of this book contain some successful verse, the reader must excuse me the discourtesy of having usurped it first. Our nothingness differs little; …

Your tenderness and terrorization, your prose sentences - like Bernini graves, staggeringly expensive, Italianate, warm, sentences once-and-for-all.

Dr. Kettle was wont to say that Seneca writes as a Boare does pisse, scilicet by jirkes.

Also Johnn Lydgate Wryteth after an hyer rate; It is dyffuse to fynde The sentence of his mynde, Yet wryteth he in his kynd, No man that can amend Those maters…