Wilkie Collins, The Woman In White Quotes
Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service.
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.
I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.
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.
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.
But, ah me! where is the faultless human creature who can persevere in a good resolution, without sometimes failing and falling back?
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.
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 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.
No sensible man ever engages, unprepared, in a fencing match of words with a woman.
Miss Fairlie laughed with a ready good-humour, which broke out as brightly as if it had been part of the sunshine above us…
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 explanation has been written already in the three words that were many enough, and plain enough, for my confession. I loved her.
I dread the beginning of her new life more than words can tell, but I see some hope for her if she travels - none if she remains at home.
But I am a just man, even to my enemy—and I will acknowledge, beforehand, that they are cleverer brains than I thought them.
Is the prison that Mr. Scoundrel lives in at the end of his career a more uncomfortable place than the workhouse that Mr. Honesty lives in at the end of his career?
Not a word had dropped from my lips, or from hers, that could unsettle either of us—and yet the same unacknowledged sense of embarrassment made us shrink alike from meeting one another alone
I am thinking, ’ he remarked quietly, ’whether I shall add to the disorder in this room, by scattering your brains about the fireplace.
The best men are not consistent in good—why should the worst men be consistent in evil?
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.
It was cold and barren. It was no longer the view that I remembered. The sunshine of her presence was far from me. The charm of her voice no longer murmured in my ear.
