Quotes by Wilkie Collins

“But compare the hardest day's work you ever did with the idleness that splits flowers and pokes its way into spiders' stomachs, and thank your stars that your head has got something it must think o...”

“The clouds had gathered, within the last half-hour. The light was dull; the distance was dim. The lovely face of Nature met us, soft and still and colourless met us without a smile.”

“mong the hundred thousand mysterious influences which a man exercises over a woman who loves him, I doubt if there is any more irresistible to her than the influence of his voice. I am not one of t...”

“Among the hundred thousand mysterious influences which a man exercises over a woman who loves him, I doubt if there is any more irresistible to her than the influence of his voice. I am not one of ...”

“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 ha...”

“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 ...”

“At any time, and under any circumstances of human interest, is it not strange to see how little real hold the objects of the natural world amid which we live can gain on our hearts and minds? We go...”

“It is not for you to say - you Englishmen, who have conquered your freedom so long ago, that you have conveniently forgotten what blood you shed, and what extremities you proceeded to in the conque...”

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

“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.”

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

“You musn't talk of a young lady *belonging* to anybody, as if she was a piece of furniture, or money in the Three per Cent, or something of that sort.”

“Only give a woman love, and there is nothing she will not venture, suffer, and do.”

“Destiny has got the rope round my neck and I feel it.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The booksthe generous friends who met me without suspicionthe 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, ...”

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

“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 tri...”

“Miss Fairlie laughed with a ready good-humour, which broke out as brightly as if it had been part of the sunshine above us”