16. A Few Epigrams From Oscar Wilde

Few parents nowadays pay any regard to what their children say to them. The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying.

Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever do they forgive them.

To lose one parent ... may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly natural being.

On His Visit To America:

Marriage is hardly a thing that one can do now and then - except in America.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

Among the more elderly inhabitants of the South I found a melancholy tendency to date every event of importance of the late war-between-the-states. "How beautiful the moon is tonight," I once remarked to a gentleman standing near me. "Yes," was his reply, "but you should have seen it before the War."

There are no trappings, no pageantry, and no gorgeous ceremonies. I saw only two processions: one was the Fire Brigade preceded by the Police, the other was the Police preceded by the Fire Brigade.

Lady Caroline: "There are great many things you haven't got in America, I am told. They say you have no ruins, and no curiosities."
Mrs. Allonby: ... "What Nonsense! They have their mothers and their manners."