Wilkie Collins Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Yes! the books - the generous friends who met me without suspicion - the merciful masters who never used me ill! The only years of my life that I can look back on with something like pride... Early and late, through the long winter nights and the quiet summer days, I drank at the fountain of knowledge, and never wearied of the draught.

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

Women can resist a man's love, a man's fame, a man's personal appearance, and a man's money, but they cannot resist a man's tongue when he knows how to talk to them.

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

I never paid you a compliment, Rachel, in my life. Successful love may sometimes use the language of flattery, I admit. But hopeless love, dearest, always speaks the truth.

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

The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.

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

Habits of literary composition are perfectly familiar to me. One of the rarest of all the intellectual accomplishments that a man can possess is the grand faculty of arranging his ideas. Immense privilege! I possess it. Do you?

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

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

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

The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared. Sympathies that lie too deep for words, too deep almost for thoughts, are touched, at such times, by other charms than those which the senses feel and which the resources of expression can realise. The mystery which underlies the beauty of women is never raised above the reach of all expression until it has claimed kindred with the deeper mystery in our own souls.

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

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

The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared.

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 roused myself from the book which I was dreaming over rather than reading, and left my chambers to meet the cool night air in the suburbs.

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

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

There are three things that none of the young men of the present generation can do.They can't sit over their wine;they can't play at wist;and they can't pay a lady a compliment.

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

I have noticed that the Christianity of a certain class of respectable people begins when they open their prayer-books at eleven o'clock on Sunday morning, and ends when they shut them up again at one o'clock on Sunday afternoon. Nothing so astonishes and insults Christians of this sort as reminding them of their Christianity on a week-day.

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

I haven't much time to be fond of anything. But when I have a moment's fondness to bestow, most times the roses get it.

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

I am (thank God) constitutionally superior to reason.

I say what other people only think, and when all the rest of the world is in a conspiracy to accept the mask for the true face, mine is the rash hand that tears off the plump pasteboard and shows the bare bones beneath.

I am an average good Christian, when you don't push my Christianity too far. And all the rest of you—which is a great comfort—are, in this respect, much the same as I am.

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

Not the shadow of a doubt crossed my mind of the purpose for which the Count had left the theatre. His escape from us, that evening, was beyond all question the preliminary only to his escape from London. The mark of the Brotherhood was on his arm-I felt as certain of it as if he had shown me the brand; and the betrayal of the Brotherhood was on his conscience-I had seen it in his recognition of Pesca.

The future of English fiction may rest with this Unknown Public - a reading public of three millions which lies right out of the pale of true literary civilization - which is now waiting to be taught the difference between a good book and a bad.

Tears are scientifically described as a Secretion. I can understand that a secretion may be healthy or unhealthy, but I cannot see the interest of a secretion from a sentimental point of view.

I haven't much time to be fond of anything ... but when I have a moment's fondness to bestow, most times ... the roses get it. I began my life among them in my father's nursery garden, and I shall end my life among them, if I can. Yes. One of these days (please God) I shall retire from catching thieves, and try my hand at growing roses.

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.

...it will always remain my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all.

I used to attend scientific experiments when I was a girl at school. They invariably ended in an explosion. If Mr. Jennings will be so very kind, I should like to be warned of the explosion this time. With a view to getting it over, if possible, before I go to bed.