Sunday, April 29, 2012

The importance of great quips

LADY BRACKNEEL: And what are your politics, Mr. Worthing?
WORTHING: Well, I am afraid, Lady Bracknell, that I really have none. I am a Liberal.



CECILY
Then have we got to part?
ALGERNON
I am afraid so. It's a very painful parting.
CECILY
It is always painful to part from people whom one has known for a very brief space of time. The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity.





MISS PRISM
Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume novel, Cecily. I wrote one myself in earlier days.
CECILY
Did you really, Miss Prism? How wonderfully clever you are! I hope it did not end happily? I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.
MISS PRISM
The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.






3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Something that I think was from the early four-act version (so I can't readily look it up) in the proposal scene:

JACK
Gwendolyn, I hope that what I am about to propose will not in any way be a shock to you.
GWENDOLYN
I am certain that it won't. I have never been shocked in my life. I think that to be shocked at anything reveals a rather low ethical standard.

--Nathan

Anonymous said...

"Poetically [in poesis, making] man dwells. That's what fiction means."
—Hölderlin

"The noble [gennaios, vornehm] end happily. The false end with non-selfs. That's what karma means."
—Nietzsche

Anonymous said...

The Buddha: In Sankhara [doing some becoming] man dwells in a temporal aiôn.

(And since temporal experience is impermanent or temporal, it's intrinsically a fail, compared with permanent, everlastingly ongoing types of experience too numerous to mention. Or if the only everlastingly ongoing not-impermanent experience is zilch, your longing is for zilch.)

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