Wilkie Collins - The Woman in White (1859)

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

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
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.

Wilkie Collins
Is there any wilderness of sand in the deserts of Arabia, is there any prospect of desolation among the ruins of Palestine, which can rival the repelling effect on the eye, and the depressing influence on the mind, of an English country town in the first stage of its existence, and in the transition state of its prosperity?

Wilkie Collins
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.

Wilkie Collins
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.

Wilkie Collins
Nature has so much to do in this world, and is engaged in generating such a vast variety of co-existent productions, that she must surely be now and then too flurried and confused to distinguish between the different processes that she is carrying on at the same time.

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

Wilkie Collins
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.

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

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

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

Wilkie Collins
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.

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

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

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

Wilkie Collins