His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion.

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.

And in his search for sensations that would be at once new and delightful, and possess that element of strangeness that is essential to romance, he would often adopt certain modes of thought that he knew to be really alien to his nature, abandon himself to their subtle influences, and then, having, as it were, caught their colour and satisfied his intellectual curiosity, leave them with that curious indifference that is not compatible with a real ardour of temperament.

It is absurd to say that there are neither ruins nor curiosities in America when they have their mothers and their manners.