Peter Ackroyd · 185 pages
Rating: (462 votes)
“It is strange, is it not, how a person can adore one's soul so much that they adore one's body also?”
― Peter Ackroyd, quote from The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde
“A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.”
― Peter Ackroyd, quote from The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde
“Some drink to forget, I drink to remember. I drink in order to understand what I mean and to discover what I know. Under its benign influence all the stories and dramas which properly belong to the sphere of art are announced by me in conversation.”
― Peter Ackroyd, quote from The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde
“absinthe removes the bitter taste of failure and grants me strange visions which are charming principally because they cannot be written down. Only in absinthe do I become entirely free and, when I drink it, I understand the symbolic mysteries of odour and of colour.”
― Peter Ackroyd, quote from The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde
“One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines.”
― Peter Ackroyd, quote from The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde
“But just as my philosophy had ceased to interest me as soon as it was formulated into a set of principles so, when I saw myself being imitated, I realised at once what an incubus my aesthetic personality might become if I were to be trapped within it. Imitation changes, not the impersonator, but the impersonated.”
― Peter Ackroyd, quote from The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde
“I can recall quite clearly the journey from Omaha to San Francisco which I made with the opera troupe; God had created the world in less time than it took us to travel across America.”
― Peter Ackroyd, quote from The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde
“the great advantage of really contemporary fiction is that one finds oneself mirror on every page”
― Peter Ackroyd, quote from The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde
“the great advantage of really contemporary fiction is that one finds oneself mirrored on every page”
― Peter Ackroyd, quote from The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde
Peter Ackroyd
Born place: in East Acton, London, The United Kingdom
Born date October 5, 1949
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“Todas queremos que nuestro enamorado sea amado por una mujer digna de él, pero jamás que sea más digna que nosotras. —Habladme de esta casa —dije—.”
― Margaret George, quote from The Memoirs of Cleopatra
“Son, that's a pretty hard question to answer. But I do believe that any wish you make can come true if you help the wish. I don't think that the Lord meant for our lives to be so simple and easy that every time we wanted something, all we had to do was wish for it and we'd get it. I don't believe that at all. If that were true, there would be a lot of lazy people in this old world. No one would be working. Everyone would be wishing for what they needed or wanted.
"Papa," I asked, "how can you help a wish?"
"Oh, there are a lot of ways," Papa said. "Hard work, faith, patience, and determination. I think prayer and really believing in your wish can help more than anything else.”
― Wilson Rawls, quote from Summer of the Monkeys
“Anticipation is the heart of wisdom. If you are going to cross a desert, you anticipate that you will be thirsty, and you take water.”
― Mark Helprin, quote from A Soldier of the Great War
“No matter how quiet and conformist a person’s life seems, there’s always a time in the past when they reached an impasse. A time when they went a little crazy. I guess people need that sort of stage in their lives.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
“The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything....The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place.”
― Milan Kundera, quote from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
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