Summer Books

Other than going out, I finally found some time to catch up on my reading as well during the summer. I've already blogged about The Zahir, so here are two other books I've managed to read.

"I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream — I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of madiaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal — to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. You, Mr Gray, you yourself, with your rose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain you cheek with shame —"

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
   To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.
   The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of  beautiful things.
   The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.
   Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
   Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.
   They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.
   There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
   The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.
   The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.
   The moral life of a man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the mortality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.
   No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.
   No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
   No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.
   Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.
   Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.
   From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type.
   All art is at once surface and symbol.
   Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
   Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.
   It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
   Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.
   When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.
   We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
   All art is quite useless.

— Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde is definitely gay, but did he really depicted Dorian Gray to be as gay as the critics say he did?

Haven't read any chick-lits in a while, so when I saw this book at Bookalicious! (a newfound bookstore selling cheap books at Summit), I decided to get it straight away XD You can never go wrong with chocolate + gossip *haha* It was a nice read with lots of hot and sexy chocolatey descriptions ^_^ Going to try to get my hands on The Chocolate Lovers' Diet next *hehe*