Artemisia Female, 20. Italy

LADY WINDERMERE: I'm not interested in her - and - you should not mention this woman and me in the same breath. It is an error of taste.

LADY WINDERMERE: I did not ask her. He insisted on her coming - against my entreaties - against my commands. Oh! the house is tainted for me! I feel that every woman here sneers at me as she dances by with my husband. What I have done to deserve this? I gave him all my life. He took it - used it - spoiled it! I am degraded in my own eyes; and I lack courage - I am a coward! [Sits down on sofa.]
LORD DARLINGTON: If I know you at all, I know that you can't live with a man who treats you like this! What sort of a life would you have with him? You would feel that he was lying to you every moment of the day - you would feel that the look in his eyes was false, his voice false, his touch false, his passion false. He would come to you when he was weary of others; you would have to comfort him. He would come to you when he was devoted to others; you would have to charm him. You would have to be to him the mask of his real life, the cloack to hide his secret.

LADY WINDERMERE: Why is he not here, to wake by passionate words some fire within me? I am cold - cold as a loveless thing.

MRS ERLYNNE: Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they're better.

LADY WINDERMERE: [...] There is the same world for all of us, and good and evil, sin and innocence, go through it hand in hand. To shut one's eyes to half of life that one may live securely is as through one blinded oneself that one might walk with more safety in a land of pit and precipice.

MRS. ALLONBY: The one advantage of playing with fire, Lady Caroline, is that one never gets even singed. It is the people who don't know how to play with it who get burned up.

MRS. ALLONBY: What a througly bad man you must be!
LORD ILLINGWORTH: What do you call a bad man?
MRS. ALLONBY: The sort of man who admires innocence.

MRS. ALLONBY: Men always want to be a woman's first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about things. What we like is to be a man's last romance.

HESTER: [...] You love the beauty that you can see and touch and handle, the beauty that you can destroy, and do destroy, but of the unseen beauty of life, of the unsee beauty of a higher life, you konw nothing. You lost life's secret. [...]

LORD ILLINGWORTH: You should never try to understand them. Women are pictures. Men are problems. If you want to know what a woman really means - wich, by the way, is always a dangerous thing to do - look at her, don't listen to her.

MRS. ARBUTHNOT: Don't be deceived, George. Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely if ever do they forgive them.