The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray

“I suffered immensely. Then it passed away. I cannot repeat an emotion. No one can , except sentimentalists.”

I always find it a little pointless to comment on anything considered a classic. Everything to be said has already been said.
But this novel has always stuck with me, even when i first read it years ago and didnt really understand the crux of it.
Sometimes i'm still unsure i do.

The detrimental effects of influence that one person can inflict on another is genuinely terrifying — how one person can entirely alter the makeup of another person just by exisiting and relaying themselves, even if the former doesn't entirely mean to do this.
I have this odd concern about myself all the time — that i'm not really my own person but just a makeup of all the people around me and all the things and art I consume. That i'm nothing but flesh and bone and mannerisms and ideals and jokes that inherently aren't mine.
In this book, Lord Henry says that art has no influence upon action, that we can indulge in it without being privy to it. He doesn't see art for what it can be, what it becomes for Dorian.
Poison.