So, it's been a long while since I've posted good excerpts from plays I'm reading, and believe me, I've been reading lots of plays this semester. Right now, I am thoroughly enjoying Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband. *sigh* So wonderfully amusing, and very insightful. So, a more serious (and kinda long) quotation from An Ideal Husband:

Sir Robert Chiltern: There was your mistake. There was your error. The error all women commit. Why can't you women love us, faults and all? Why do you place us on monstrous pedestals? We have all feet of clay, women as well as men; but when we men love women, we love tehm knowing their weaknesses, their follies, their imperfections, love them all the more, it may be, for that reason. It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love. It is when we are wounded by our own hands, or by the hands of others, that love should come to cure us - else what use is love at all? All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive. All lives, save loveless lives, true Love should pardon. A man's love si like that. It is wider, larger, more human than a woman's. Women think that they are making ideals of men. What they are making of us are false idols merely. You made your false idol of me, and I had not the courage to come down, show you my wounds, tell you my weaknesses. I was afraid that I might lose your love, as I have lost it now. ... Let women no more make ideals of men! Let them not put them on alters or bow before them, or they may ruin their lives as completely as you - you whom I have so wildly loved - have ruined mine!