Wilkie Collins quotes

This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve. (Wilkie Collins)
We had our breakfasts--whatever happens in a house, robbery or murder, it doesn't matter, you must have your breakfast. View quote
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. View quote
Wilkie Collins
Men ruin themselves headlong for unworthy women. View quote
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. View quote
Wilkie Collins
My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody. View quote
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. View quote
Wilkie Collins
Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service. View quote
Wilkie Collins
I am nothing but a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man. View quote
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. View quote
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)
Dont speak of tomorrow. Let the music speak to us tonight, in a happier language than ours. View quote
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. View quote
Wilkie Collins
Some of us rush through life and some of us saunter through life. Mrs. Vesey sat through life. View quote
Wilkie Collins
Well may your heart believe the truths I tell; 'Tis virtue makes the bliss, where'er we dwell. View quote
Wilkie Collins
I have always maintained that the one important phenomenon presented by modern society is - the enormous prosperity of Fools. View quote
Wilkie Collins
It is the nature of truth to struggle to the light. View quote
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? View quote
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. View quote
Wilkie Collins
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. View quote
Wilkie Collins
People who read stories are said to have excitable brains. (Wilkie Collins)
Rosanna Spearman had been a thief, and not being of the sort that get up Companies in the City, and rob from thousands, instead of only robbing from one, the law laid hold of her, and the prison and the reformatory followed the lead of the law. View quote
Wilkie Collins
I confess I have often fancied myself transformed into some other person, and have felt a certian pleasure in seeing myself in my new chracter. One of our first amusements as children (if we have any imagination at all) is to get out of our own characters, and to try the characters of other personages as a change-to be fairies, to be queens, to be anything, in short, but what we really are. View quote
Wilkie Collins
No man under Heaven deserves these sacrifices from us women. Men! They are the enemies of our innocence and our peace - they drag us away from our parents' love and our sisters' friendship - they take us body and soul to themselves, and fasten our helpless lives to theirs as they chain up a dog to his kennel. View quote
Wilkie Collins
The actions of human beings are not invariably governed by the laws of pure reason. View quote
Wilkie Collins