Quotes from Candida

“A bandstand, an unfinished forum for religious, anti-religious and political orators, cricket pitches, a gymnasium, and an old fashioned stone kiosk are among its attractions. Wherever the prospect is bounded by trees or rising green grounds, it is a pleasant place.”

A dry, wry catalogue that deflates the park's grandeur through its plain, unsentimental list of attractions.

“Altogether the room is the room of a good housekeeper, vanquished, as far as the table is concerned, by an untidy man, but elsewhere mistress of the situation.”

Shaw wraps a wry domestic character sketch into a single balanced sentence with a witty turn at the end.

“He is a first rate clergyman, able to say what he likes to whom he likes, to lecture people without setting himself up against them, to impose his authority on them without humiliating them, and to interfere in their business without impertinence.”

A parallel run of infinitives builds an ironic, affectionate portrait of the clergyman's social skill.

“He is a conceitedly well intentioned, enthusiastic, immature person, with nothing positively unbearable about him except a habit of speaking with his lips carefully closed for half an inch from each corner, a finicking arthulation, and a set of horribly corrupt vowels, notably ow for o, this being his chief means of bringing Oxford refinement to bear on Hackney vulgarity.”

Comic precision in the stage direction, with the closing clause delivering a sharp social joke about speech and class.

“An honest man feels that he must pay Heaven for every hour of happiness with a good spell of hard, unselfish work to make others happy. We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.”

Morell's moral creed, stated with a clean economic analogy that shows the sermonising voice Shaw gives him.

“Her ways are those of a woman who has found that she can always manage people by engaging their affection, and who does so frankly and instinctively without the smallest scruple.”

Shaw characterises Candida through a measured, observant sentence that balances warmth with a hint of calculation.

“He is so entirely uncommon as to be almost unearthly; and to prosaic people there is something noxious in this unearthliness, just as to poetic people there is something angelic in it.”

A neat antithesis in which the same quality is read two opposite ways, depending on the observer.

“MARCHBANKS (seriously). I suppose a machine could be made to write love-letters. They're all the same, aren't they!”

Marchbanks's naive literalism undercuts Prossy's briskness with a deadpan question that stings.

“Yes, to be idle, selfish and useless: that is to be beautiful and free and happy: hasn't every man desired that with all his soul for the woman he loves? That's my ideal: what's yours, and that of all the dreadful people who live in these hideous rows of houses? Sermons and scrubbing brushes!”

Marchbanks's romantic outburst is vivid and rhythmic, setting poetic idealism against domestic drudgery in a tight, punchy close.

“Why, the flaming sword--(Morell stamps with impatience.) Well, in plain prose, I loved her so exquisitely that I wanted nothing more than the happiness of being in such love. And before I had time to come down from the highest summits, you came in.”

Marchbanks mocks his own high-flown diction, and the 'plain prose' turn shows Shaw's comic ear for an adolescent's grandiloquence.

“CANDIDA (confident, smiling at Eugene). Oh, there is no fear. He has learnt to live without happiness.”

A brief, cool line whose ironic certainty makes the character's self-assurance and the play's tension felt at once.