Wilkie Collins Quotes

May I ask a question, doctor? Is she pining in this close place, too? When her sister comes, will her sister take her away?

Husbands and wives talk of the cares of matrimony, and bachelors and spinsters bear them.

The human heart is unsearchable. Who is to fathom it?

the window, turned back again into the room,

Miss Fairlie laughed with a ready good-humour, which broke out as brightly as if it had been part of the sunshine above us ...

Leave me my delusion, dearest! I must have that to cherish, and to comfort me, if I have nothing else!

Well may your heart believe the truths I tell; 'Tis virtue makes the bliss, where'er we dwell.

Are you free of each other, pretty Mrs. Valeria, by common consent of both parties?

It is one of my rules in life, never to notice what I don't understand.

Some of us rush through life and some of us saunter through life. Mrs. Vesey sat through life.

I am (thank God!) constitutionally superior to reason.

To-day we love, what to-morrow we hate.

Evil report, with time and chance to help it, travels patiently, and travels far.

Silence is safe.

So do extremes meet; and such is sometimes the all-embracing capacity of the approval of a fool!

The books - the generous friends who met me without suspicion - the merciful masters who never used me ill!

My business in life is to eat, drink, sleep, and die. Everything else is superfluity and I will have none of it.

Through all the ways of our unintelligible world, the trivial and the terrible walk hand in hand together.

Dont speak of tomorrow.Let the music speak to us tonight,in a happier language than ours.

Every human institution (Justice included) will stretch a little, if only you pull it in the right way.

After the lapse of a minute, I roused my manhood, and opened the door.

We don't want genius in this country unless it is accompanied by respectability.

But I am a just man, even to my enemy - and I will acknowledge, beforehand, that they are cleverer brains than I thought them.

How much happier we should be,' she thought to herself sadly, 'if we never grew up!

She looked so irresistibly beautiful as she said those brave words that no man alive could have steel his heart against her.

The answer almost unmanned me.

I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.

Characters to the Story,

My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody.

In all my experience along the dirtiest ways of this dirty little world, I have never met with such a thing as a trifle yet.

I smell your cigar. Delicious! Give me one directly.

We meet as mortal enemies hereafter - let us, like gallant gentlemen, exchange polite attentions in the meantime.

Except in this ignorant and material century, men have always worn precious stuffs and beautiful colours as well as women.

I am a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man!

He was in that state of highly respectful sulkiness which is peculiar to English servants.

I have always maintained that the one important phenomenon presented by modern society is - the enormous prosperity of Fools.

How can you expect four women to dine together alone every day, and not quarrel?

No sensible man ever engages, unprepared, in a fencing match of words with a woman.

Your tears come easy, when you're young, and beginning the world. Your tears come easy, when you're old, and leaving it. I burst out crying.

The cook looked as if she could grill Mr. Superintendent alive on a furnace, and the other women looked as if they could eat him when he was done.

One of the rarest of all the intellectual accomplishments that a man can possess is the grand faculty of arranging his ideas.

He has trifled with the sacred memory of my husband," thought the Professor's widow. "On my life and honor, I will make him pay for it.

Grief has this that is noble in it - it accepts all sympathy, come whence it may. She

Men little know when they say hard things to us how well we remember them, and how much harm they do us.

We neither know nor judge ourselves; others may judge, but cannot know us. God alone judges and knows us.

I am not against hasty marriages where a mutual flame is fanned by an adequate income.

Forgive me, dear Mr. Troy! I am very unhappy, and very unreasonable - but I am only a woman, and you must not expect too much from me.

She was unlike most girls of her age, in this
that she had ideas of her own.

The mountain-path of Action is no longer a path for me; my future hope pauses with my present happiness in the shadowed valley of Repose.

The small pulse of the life within me, and the great heart of the city around me, seemed to be sinking in unison.

See with nobody's eyes, we hear with nobody's ears, we feel with nobody's hearts, but our own.

But you make allowances for women; we all talk nonsense. Good

The explanation has been written already in the three words that were many enough, and plain enough, for my confession. I loved her.

The horrid mystery hanging over us in this house gets into my head like liquor, and makes me wild.

The English intellect is sound, so far as it goes,but it has one grave defect
it is always cautious in the wrong place.

We had our breakfasts
whatever happens in a house, robbery or murder, it doesn't matter, you must have your breakfast.

Pedants, who have the least knowledge to be proud of, are impelled most by vanity.

I am thinking,' he remarked quietly, 'whether I shall add to the disorder in this room, by scattering your brains about the fireplace.

The evening advanced. The shadows lengthened. The waters of the lake grew pitchy black. The gliding of the ghostly swans became rare and more rare.

Peace rules the day, where reason rules the mind.

Only give a woman love, and there is nothing she will not venture, suffer, and do.

Here is one more book that depicts the struggle of a human creature, under those opposing influences of Good and Evil,

It is quite possible that I may be altogether wrong in this idea. My own impression, however, is, that I am right.

I roused myself from the book which I was dreaming over rather than reading,

were we two following our widely parted roads towards one point in the mysterious future, at which we were to meet once more?

expression - nothing

The rod of iron with which he rules her never appears in company
it is a private rod, and is always kept upstairs.

And earth was heaven a little the worse for wear. And heaven was earth, done up again to look like new.

The deserts of Arabia are innocent of our civilised desolation-the ruins of Palestine are incapable of our modern gloom!

It is the grand misfortune of my life that nobody will let me alone.

He has that quiet deference, that look of pleased, attentive interest, in listening to a woman, which, say what we may, we can none of us resist.

I dread the beginning of her new life more than words can tell, but I see some hope for her if she travels - none if she remains at home.

It is the nature of truth to struggle to the light.

This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve.

I should have looked into my own heart, and found this new growth springing up there, and plucked it out while it was young.

What lurking temptations to forbidden tenderness find their finding-places in a woman's dressing-gown, when she is alone in her room at night!

I have degraded myself by ever thinking of him as my husband.

I have heard, as everybody else has, of a spirit's haunting a house ; but I have had my own personal experience of a house's haunting a spirit.

What are we (I ask) but puppets in a show-box? Oh, omnipotent Destiny, pull our strings gently! Dance us mercifully off our moserable little stage!

But, ah me! where is the faultless human creature who can persevere in a good resolution, without sometimes failing and falling back?

The dress of Virtue, in our parts, was cotton print. I had silk.

You musn't talk of a young lady *belonging* to anybody, as if she was a piece of furniture, or money in the Three per Cent, or something of that sort.

Even lawyers have hearts, and mine ached a little as I took leave of her. The

Very strange!" he said to himself, vacantly. "It's like a scene in a novel - it's like nothing in real life." He

I hope I take up the cause of all oppressed people rather warmly.

He was, out of all sight (as I remember him), the nicest boy that ever spun a top or broke a window.

The fool's crime is the crime that is found out and the wise man's crime is the crime that is not found out.

Ah! How much happiness there is in life if we will only have the patience to wait for it.

Men ruin themselves headlong for unworthy women.

heard mother speak of him. Father? Ah, dear!

You don't have to speak at all
I know what you'd say ...
- Laura

The law will argue any thing, with any body who will pay the law for the use of its brains and its time.

Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service.

Some to business, some to pleasure take, But every woman is at heart a rake.'" "The

I sadly want a reform in the construction of children. Nature's only idea seems to be to make them machines for the production of incessant noise.

The best men are not consistent in good - why should the worst men be consistent in evil?

Any woman who is sure of her own wits, is a match, at any time, for a man who is not sure of his own temper.

To be told, for the first time, in this place. As the Judge

Don't let me think.

Let the music speak to us of tonight, in a happier language than our own.