De Profundis
In the winter of 1897, in a prison cell at Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde sat down to write a letter that would become one of the most extraordinary documents in English literature. Addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas, the young aristocrat whose love had wrecked Wilde's life, the letter unfolds as both indictment and confession, accusation and surrender. What begins as fury curdles into something stranger: Wilde examines their years of passion and excess, traces the arc of his own vanity and weakness, and arrives at an unexpected place. In the brutal silence of his cell, he finds himself identifying with Christ, not the church's Christ, but the romantic outsider, the suffering artist. Through his degradation, Wilde discovers that sorrow can become a kind of sanctuary, and that even in the depths, the soul may flower. This is not a prison memoir. It is a meditation on love, justice, and what it costs to be alive in a world that demands your hiding. Raw, eloquent, and unbearably moving, De Profundis is Wilde's gift to us from the abyss.
Editions
X-Ray
“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.””
— Oscar Wilde
“Hearts are made to be broken.””
— Oscar Wilde
“With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy?””
— Oscar Wilde
“The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one’s heart”
— Oscar Wilde
“To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.””
— Oscar Wilde
“The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.””
— Oscar Wilde
“When you really want love, you will find it waiting for you.””
— Oscar Wilde
“The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?””
— Oscar Wilde
“The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving.””
— Oscar Wilde
