“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single
word of what I am saying.”
Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie
Wills Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland on October 16th, 1854 and died impoverished in Paris on November 30th, 1900.
"I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china."
He was often ridiculously flamboyant and a
brilliant conversationalist.
Celebrated and praised by glittering London society and the fashionable
elite, he energetically expressed his own daring, personal style through long hair, colorful clothes and a habit of carrying little bouquets
when lecturing.
"The only thing worse in the world
than being talked about is not being talked about."
Mostly known as a playwright
in the early 1890s, Wilde also exercised his writing talents & wit into
works of poetry, epigrams, essays, dialogues and his one novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
“With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?”
First appearing in
Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in the summer of 1890, The Picture Of Dorian Gray was the only published novel by Oscar
Wilde. From the magazine version, Wilde amended and revised the story into the
novel that was then published in April of 1891 by Ward, Lock And Company. The
craving to stay young and beautiful is certainly not foreign to our present
age… but what lengths will you go to preserve it. Leading a double life is a
dangerous and tricky path to walk.
“The only way to get rid of temptation
is to yield to it.”
Fame, a fourteen-year
marriage to the wealthy Constance Lloyd and various law suits, combined with unprincipled
friends and a growing double life of his own to send Wilde into a decline
that finally carried him into a prison sentence at Pentonville and then Wandsworth
Prison in London.
His health ruined, Oscar
Wilde went into exile in Paris and spent his last days there in a dismal room - about which he
quipped – “My
wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us has got to go.” Originally a pension house called
Hôtel d’Alsace, this renovated Left Bank luxury hotel now offers a stay in
various rooms famous for their former occupants – including The Oscar Wilde
Room.
"Never
trust a woman who tells you her real age; a woman who tells you that would tell
you anything."
Buried in Père Lachaise
cemetery, Oscar Wilde’s monument was kissed so many times with red-lipsticked
smooches that to prevent further damage, it has been encased in glass. It remains a favorite grave in the
famed Paris cemetery.
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