Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.
Interpretation
Fiction reflects the nature of life, where good outcomes bring happiness and bad outcomes bring sorrow.
This quote by Oscar Wilde highlights the inherent structure of storytelling in fiction, where narratives typically resolve in a way that aligns with moral expectations. It suggests that fiction serves a purpose in illustrating the contrasts of good and bad, ultimately reinforcing a sense of order and satisfaction in how stories conclude.
In practice
Use this quote to introduce a discussion on the role of fiction in literature classes.
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
When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.
Not hammer-strokes, but dance of the water, sings the pebbles into perfection.
Novel writing is the slowest art form in the world. It is not a sprint. It is not even a marathon. It is a series of marathons that stretch over and over across a continent.
We, as film-makers, are privileged. We can make people cry or laugh. We can make them think and feel. It is a great privilege and a great responsibility.
We had access to too much equipment, too much money, and little by little we went insane.
There are writers in Germany who drink the Absolute like water; and there are books in which even the dogs make references to the Infinite.
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