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The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
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The Picture of Dorian Gray (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Oscar Wilde

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12,27913474 (4.04)277
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Barnes & Noble Classics (2003), Paperback, 288 pages

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English (130)  French (3)  Spanish (1)  All languages (134)
Showing 1-5 of 130 (next | show all)
This story was really interesting. I think we can’t expect the end. But, I knew “Dorian”, the main character of this story because I’ve seen the movie “The league of legend”. He’s a character in the movie. So I could enjoy reading more! And, I was interested in the character “Lord Henry”. I think he changed Dorian. I wanted to know about him. ( )
1 vote miyukih | Dec 24, 2009 |
Loved it. Consistently interesting, though a few of the speeches dragged on as did a few of Wilde's "detailing paragraphs." Though I may not have agreed with everything that was said, overall it was very good, and Wilde is a beautiful writer. ( )
1 vote AlbinoRhino | Dec 23, 2009 |
I could think of the darkness of the human.
I think this is interesting story. ( )
  harunak | Dec 17, 2009 |
The beautiful boy Dorian was painted by the painter of his friend.
Dorian in the picture was very beautiful.And he want to keep himself young and beautiful.
But he repeat to commit crimes in spite of his pure face.
Then,his picture start to change...

This story was very expressive and grim.
So I don't know how to say after reading it.
Dolian's life and personality was very fragile. ( )
  deep_tarutaru | Dec 16, 2009 |
Reading A Picture of Dorian Gray was a transformative experience. Often times, too often, I felt like Dorian himself reading about his own life from the view of one past. The idea of living a life for the senses, one of nothing but desire and pleasure, is too close to home. Oscar Wilde’s wit manifested through Lord Henry was the OG caustic, cynic intellects for which many I know strive to be. I am somewhere in the middle of Dorian and the Lord. I am nowhere at the same time, since I am just a modern man using technology. Still, I can dream that I am not a loser and don’t spend all my time writing reviews because I have nothing else going for me. I want to be loved and hated, I want to smoke in an opium den, I want to commit suicide by destroying the painting of myself that’s kept my youth in tact. No, I want none of it. Now that I’ve finished Dorian Gray, there’s nowhere left for me to go, nothing left for me to do. I have no outlet. Just as Oscar Wilde finishes his masterpiece wit the unaware suicide of his handsome devil, a knife through his heart, lying decrepit on the floor, I have no where else to venture. I have exhausted life, or has life exhausted me? ( )
  TakeItOrLeaveIt | Dec 10, 2009 |
Showing 1-5 of 130 (next | show all)
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Epigraph
Dedication
First words
The studio was filled with the rich odor of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amid the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink flowering thorn.
La fragancia de las rosas llenaba el estudio y, al soplar entre los árboles del jardín la suave brisa estival, entraba por la puerta abierta el fuerte olor de las lilas o el perfume más sutil del rosado espino en flor.
Quotations
'Your rank and wealth, Harry; my brains, such as they are -- my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks -- we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.'
'Harry,' said Basil Hallward, looking him straight in the face, 'every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.'
He played with the idea and grew willful; tossed it into the air and transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy and winged it with paradox. The praise of folly, as he went on, soared into a philosophy, and Philosophy herself became young, and catching the mad music of pleasure, wearing, one might fancy, her wine-stained robe and wreath of ivy, danced like a Bacchante over the hills of life, and mocked the slow Silenus for being sober. Facts fled before her like frightened forest things. Her white feet trod the huge press at which wise Omar sits, till the seething grape-juice rose round her bare limbs in waves of purple bubbles, or crawled in red foam over the vat's black, dripping, sloping sides. It was an extraordinary improvisation. He felt that the eyes of Dorian Gray were fixed on him, and the consciousness that amongst his audience there was one whose temperament he wished to fascinate seemed to give his wit keenness and to lend colour to his imagination. He was brilliant, fantastic, irresponsible. He charmed his listeners out of themselves, and they followed his pipe, laughing. Dorian Gray never took his gaze off him, but sat like one under a spell, smiles chasing each other over his lips and wonder growing grave in his darkening eyes.
Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
Last words
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Disambiguation notice
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Wikipedia in English (1)

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Book description
Dorian Gray has just had his portrait painted. It is a perfect likeness of the quite extraordinary beautiful young man, and it prompts him to make a mad wish for eternal youth. In the years to come, he devotes his public life to and aestheticism-and his private one to decadence and debauchery.

Amazon.com (ISBN 014043187X, Paperback)

A lush, cautionary tale of a life of vileness and deception or a loving portrait of the aesthetic impulse run rampant? Why not both? After Basil Hallward paints a beautiful, young man's portrait, his subject's frivolous wish that the picture change and he remain the same comes true. Dorian Gray's picture grows aged and corrupt while he continues to appear fresh and innocent. After he kills a young woman, "as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife," Dorian Gray is surprised to find no difference in his vision or surroundings. "The roses are not less lovely for all that. The birds sing just as happily in my garden."

As Hallward tries to make sense of his creation, his epigram-happy friend Lord Henry Wotton encourages Dorian in his sensual quest with any number of Wildean paradoxes, including the delightful "When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy." But despite its many languorous pleasures, The Picture of Dorian Gray is an imperfect work. Compared to the two (voyeuristic) older men, Dorian is a bore, and his search for ever new sensations far less fun than the novel's drawing-room discussions. Even more oddly, the moral message of the novel contradicts many of Wilde's supposed aims, not least "no artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style." Nonetheless, the glamour boy gets his just deserts. And Wilde, defending Dorian Gray, had it both ways: "All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment."

(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:57 -0400)

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