Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out.
Interpretation
The quote humorously reflects the struggles of writing and the importance of punctuation.
This quote by Oscar Wilde illustrates the meticulous and often frustrating process of writing, particularly the role that punctuation plays in conveying meaning. It suggests that great care is taken to achieve clarity and precision in writing, often leading to a labor-intensive editing process that can feel trivial yet is crucial for effective communication.
In practice
In a writing workshop when discussing the challenges of editing.
Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
London is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produce the serious people, or whether the serious people produce the fogs, I don't know.
When one has never heard a man's name in the course of one's life, it speaks volumes for him; he must be quite respectable.
Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.
A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.
His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be
'The difficulty with this conversation,' said Arthur after a sort of pondering look had crawled slowly across his face like a mountaineer negotiating a tricky outcrop, 'is that it's very different from most of the ones I've had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees.'
All the fun is in how you say a thing.
Nobody gave me what I wanted for my birthday! Nobody! What sort of presents do you call these? New shoes, a green sweater and a bunch of stupid toys!" "What were you expecting?" "Real estate!
Before I had a double mastectomy, I was already pretty flat-chested, and I made so many jokes over the years about how small my chest was that I started to think that maybe my boobs overheard me... and were just like, 'You know what? We're sick of this. Let's kill her.'
One way to make sure crime doesn't pay would be to let the government run it.
Well, Art is Art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.