Wilkie Collins > Quotes

“My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“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 Woman in White

“Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“No sensible man ever engages, unprepared, in a fencing match of words with a woman.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“Silence is safe.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“Let the music speak to us of tonight, in a happier language than our own.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“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, The Moonstone

“Some of us rush through life, and some of us saunter through life. Mrs Vesey sat through life.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“I am a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man!”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“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, The Woman in White

“Don't let me think.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“She looked so irresistibly beautiful as she said those brave words that no man alive could have steel his heart against her.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“My business in life is to eat, drink, sleep, and die. Everything else is superfluity and I will have none of it. ”
― Wilkie Collins, The Dead Secret

“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.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“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, The Woman in White

“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 Woman in White

“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, The Woman in White

“...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, The Woman in White

“At the age when we are all of us most apt to take our colouring, in the form of a reflection from the colouring of other people, he had been sent abroad, and had been passed on from one nation to another, before there was time for any one colouring more than another to settle itself on him firmly. As a consequence of this, he had come back with so many different sides to his character, all more or less jarring with each other, that he seemed to pass his life in a state of perpetual contradiction with himself. He could be a busy man, and a lazy man; cloudy in the head, and clear in the head; a model of determination, and a spectacle of helplessness, all together. He had his French side, and his German side, and his Italian side--the original English foundation showing through, every now and then, as much as to say, "Here I am, sorely transmogrified, as you see, but there's something of me left at the bottom of him still.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone

“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.”
― Wilkie Collins, My Miscellanies

“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.”
― Wilkie Collins, Armadale

“And earth was heaven a little the worse for wear. And heaven was earth, done up again to look like new. ”
― Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone

“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, Armadale

“Nothing in this world is hidden forever. The gold which has lain for centuries unsuspected in the ground, reveals itself one day on the surface. Sand turns traitor, and betrays the footstep that has passed over it; water gives back to the tell-tale surface the body that has been drowned. Fire itself leaves the confession, in ashes, of the substance consumed in it. Hate breaks its prison-secrecy in the thoughts, through the doorway of the eyes; and Love finds the Judas who betrays it by a kiss. Look where we will, the inevitable law of revelation is one of the laws of nature: the lasting preservation of a secret is a miracle which the world has never yet seen.”
― Wilkie Collins, No Name

“When two members of a family or two intimate friends are separated, and one goes abroad and one remains at home, the return of the relative or friend who has been travelling always seems to place the relative or friend who has been staying at home at a painful disadvantage when the two first meet. The sudden encounter of the new thoughts and new habits eagerly gained in the one case, with the old thoughts and old habits passively preserved in the other, seems at first to part the sympathies of the most loving relatives and the fondest friends, and to set a sudden strangeness, unexpected by both and uncontrollable by both, between them on either side.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“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, Man and Wife

“The best men are not consistent in good-- why should the worst men be consistent in evil.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“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, The Moonstone

“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, The Woman in White

“You are not to take it, if you please, as the saying of an ignorant man, when I express my opinion that such a book as ROBINSON CRUSOE never was written, and never will be written again. I have tried that book for years—generally in combination with a pipe of tobacco—and I have found it my friend in need in all the necessities of this mortal life. When my spirits are bad—ROBINSON CRUSOE. When I want advice—ROBINSON CRUSOE. In past times when my wife plagued me; in present times when I have had a drop too much—ROBINSON CRUSOE. I have worn out six stout ROBINSON CRUSOES with hard work in my service. On my lady's last birthday she gave me a seventh. I took a drop too much on the strength of it; and ROBINSON CRUSOE put me right again. Price four shillings and sixpence, bound in blue, with a picture into the bargain.
”
― Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone

“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.”
― 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, The Woman in White

“When a woman wants me to do anything (my daughter, or not, it doesn't matter), I always insist on knowing why. The oftener you make them rummage their own minds for a reason, the more manageable you will find them in all the relations of life. It isn't their fault (poor wretches!) that they act first and think afterwards; it's the fault of the fools who humour them.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone

“Here follows the substance of what I said, written out entirely for your benefit. Pay attention to it, or you will be all abroad, when we get deeper into the story. Clear your mind of the children, or the dinner, or the new bonnet, or what not. Try if you can't forget politics, horses, prices in the city and grievances at the club. I hope you won't take this freedom on my part amiss; it's only a way I have of appealing to a gentle reader. Lord! haven't I seen you with the greatest authors in your hands, and don't I know how ready your attention is to wander when it's a book that asks for it, instead of a person?”
― Wilkie Collins

“I smell your cigar. Delicious! Give me one directly.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Haunted Hotel

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

“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, The Woman in White

“We had our breakfasts--whatever happens in a house, robbery or murder, it doesn't matter, you must have your breakfast.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone

“Lo que no está en mi corazón, no lo escribirá mi pluma.”
― Wilkie Collins, No Name

“Demandez-vous s´il y a une explication au mystere de la vie et de la mort”
― Wilkie Collins, The Haunted Hotel

“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.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone

“There is nothing serious in mortality! Solomon in all his glory was Solomon with the elements of the contemptible lurking in every fold of his robes and in every corner of his palace.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“A man with delicately-strung nerves often says and does things which often lead us to think more meanly of him than he deserves. It is his great misfortune constantly to present himself at his worst. On the other hand, a man provided with nerves vigorously constituted, is provided also with a constitutional health and a hardihood wich express themselves brightly in his manners, and which lead to a mistaken impression that his nature is what it appears to be on the surface. Having good health, he has good spirits. Having good spirits, he wins as an agreeable companion on the persons with whom he comes in contact - although he may be hiding all the while, under an outer covering which is physically wholesome, an inner nature which is morally diseased.”
― Wilkie Collins, Poor Miss Finch

“Is it necessary to say what my first impression was when I looked at my visitor's card? Surely not! My sister having married a foreigner, there was but one impression that any man in his senses could possibly feel. Of course the Count had come to borrow money of me.

"Louis," I said, "do you think he would go away if you gave him five shillings?”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“Now I will be anything else you please, except dull. You may say I have been dull already? As I am an honest woman, I don't agree with you. There are some people who bring dull minds to their reading - and them blame the writer for it. I say no more.”
― Wilkie Collins, Poor Miss Finch

“If he was right, here was our quiet English house suddenly invaded by a devilish Indian Diamond - bringing after it a conspiracy of living rogues, set loose on us by the vengeance of a dead man".”
― Wilkie Collins

“You hear more than enough of married people living together miserably. Here is an example to the contrary. Let it be a warning to some of you, and an encouragement to others. In the meantime, I will go on with my story.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone

“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 Woman in White

“The small pulse of the life within me and the great heart of th city around me seemed to be sinking in unison.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White