#Jack and Algy are chaotic best friends

[accio-snape]

Algernon Moncrieff ✨

—Excerpts from The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People

(Can also be taken as an Oscar Wilde appreciation post because IoBE is a really great read. If you haven't read it yet, I urge you to do so.)

1. “Oh! it is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn’t. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read.”

2. “The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!”

3. “You don’t seem to realise, that in married life three is company and two is none.”

4. “My dear fellow, it isn’t easy to be anything nowadays. There’s such a lot of beastly competition about.”

5. “I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them.”

6. “Good afternoon, dear Algernon, I hope you are behaving very well.” — “I’m feeling very well, Aunt Augusta.”

7. “You see, if one plays good music, people don’t listen, and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.”

8. “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.”

9. (Algy is in Bold-Italic) “I am sick to death of cleverness...I wish to goodness we had a few fools left.”—“We have.”—“I should extremely like to meet them. What do they talk about?”—“The fools? Oh! about the clever people, of course.”—“What fools!”

10. “It is awfully hard work doing nothing. However, I don’t mind hard work where there is no definite object of any kind.”

11. “Oh, that’s nonsense, Algy. You never talk anything but nonsense.”—“Nobody ever does.”

12. (This exchange is with Cecily.) “You are looking a little worse.”—“That's because I am hungry.”

13. (Still with Cecily.) “Miss Prism says that all good looks are a snare.”—“They are a snare that every sensible man would like to be caught in.”

14. “My duty as a gentleman has never interfered with my pleasures in the smallest degree.”

15. “If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.”

16. “Well, one must be serious about something, if one wants to have any amusement in life.”

17. “You can’t possibly ask me to go without having some dinner. It’s absurd. I never go without my dinner. No one ever does, except vegetarians and people like that.”