Importance of Being Earnest

Miss Prism:
Do you mind if I take your picture?

Cecily:
No, I often like to be looked at.

Miss Prism:
What a lesson for him. I trust he will profit by it.

Cecily:
You must not laugh at me, darling, but it has always been a girlish dream of mine to love a man named Earnest.

Jack:
Actually, I was found.

Lady Bracknell:
Found?

Jack:
Uh, yes, I was in... a handbag.

Lady Bracknell:
A handbag?

Jack:
Yes, it was...

Jack:
an ordinary handbag.

Algy:
But, what if I had some other name?

Cecily:
Another name?

Algy:
Well... Algy, for instance.

Cecily:
I would greatly respect you, but I wouldn't love you.

Gwendolyn:
In matters of utmost importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.

Gwendolyn:
Where questions of self-sacrifice are concerned, men are infinitely beyond us!

Lady Bracknell:
You seem to be displaying signs of triviality.

Jack:
On the contrary, Aunt Augusta. I've now realized for the first time in my life the vital importance of being Ernest.

Jack:
Lady Bracknell, I hate to seem inquisitive, but would you kindly inform me who I am?

Gwendolyn:
Let us preserve a dignified silence.

Cecily:
Certainly. It is the only thing to do now.

Gwendolyn:
This dignified silence seems to produce an unpleasant effect.

Jack:
Algy, you're always talking nonsense.

Algy:
It's better than listening to it.

Lady Bracknell:
To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness.

Cecily:
What a charming boy, I like his hair so much!

Jack:
Good heavens, I suppose a man may eat his own muffins in his own garden.

Algy:
But you have just said it was perfectly heartless to eat muffins!

Jack:
I said it was perfectly heartless of YOU under the circumstances. That is a very different thing.

Algy:
That may be, but the muffins are the same!

Miss Prism:
The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

Cecily:

Jack:
How you can sit there eating muffins when we're in this terrible trouble, I can't understand!

Algy:
I can hardly eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs.

Algy:
Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?

Lane:
I didn't think it polite to listen, Sir.

Algy:
But why does your aunt call you her uncle?

Algy:
"From little Cecily, with her fondest love to her dear Uncle Jack." There is no objection, I admit, to an aunt being a small aunt, but why an aunt, no matter what her size may be, should call her own nephew her uncle, I can't quite make out.

Lady Bracknell:
The unfashionable side. I thought there was something.

Lady Bracknell:
However, that could easily be altered.

Jack:
Do you mean the fashion, or the side?

Lady Bracknell:
Well, both, if necessary, I presume!

Jack:
Then a passionate celibacy is all that any of us can look forward to.