And let me touch those curving claws of yellow ivory; and grasp the tail that like a monstrous asp coils round your heavy velvet paws.

That very concentration of vision and intensity of purpose which is the characteristic of the artistic temperament is in itself a mode of limitation. To those who are preoccupied with the beauty of form nothing else seems of much importance.

A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public to him are non-existent.

Lord Illingworth told me this morning that there was an orchid there as beautiful as the seven deadly sins.

Oh, I don’t care about Jack. I don’t care for anybody in the whole world but you. I love you, Cecily. You will marry me, won’t you? You silly boy! Of course. Why, we have been engaged for the last three months. For the last three months?

I was dominated, soul, brain, and power by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.

It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love.