Wilkie Collins Quotes

53 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Wilkie Collins
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.

Wilkie Collins
If I ever meet with the man who fulfills my ideal, I shall make it a condition of the marriage settlement, that I am to have chocolate under the pillow.

Wilkie Collins
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.

Wilkie Collins
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.

Wilkie Collins
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.

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

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

Wilkie Collins
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?

Wilkie Collins
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.

Wilkie Collins
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.

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

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

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

Wilkie Collins
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.

Wilkie Collins
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.

Wilkie Collins
Where is the woman who has ever really torn from her heart the image that has been once fixed in it by a true love? Books tell us that such unearthly creatures have existed - but what does our own experiences say in answer to books?

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

Wilkie Collins
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.

Wilkie Collins
I am a citizen of the world, and I have met, in my time, with so many different sorts of virtue, that I am puzzled, in my old age, to say which is the right sort and which is the wrong.

Wilkie Collins
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.

Wilkie Collins
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.

Wilkie Collins