Top 160 Wilkie Collins Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The upshot of it was, that 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.”

— Wilkie Collins

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “You have heard of beautiful young ladies falling in love at first sight, and have thought it natural enough. But a housemaid out of a reformatory, with a plain face and a deformed shoulder, falling in love, at first sight, with a gentleman who comes on a visit to her mistress’s house, match me that, in the way of an absurdity, out of any story-book in Christendom, if you can! I.”

— Wilkie Collins

56. “Through all the ways of our unintelligible world, the trivial and the terrible walk hand in hand together.”

— Wilkie Collins

57. “The sad truth is, I am a martyr to my own sense of order. All untidiness, all want of system and regularity, cause me the acutest irritation. My attention is distracted, my composure is upset;.”

— Wilkie Collins

58. “If I ever meet with the man who fulfills my ideal, I shall make it a condition of the marriage settlement, that I am to have chocolate under the pillow.”

— Wilkie Collins

59. “Husbands and wives talk of the cares of matrimony, and bachelors and spinsters bear them.”

— Wilkie Collins

60. “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

61. “The human heart is unsearchable. Who is to fathom it?”

— Wilkie Collins

62. “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

63. “If ever sorrow and suffering set their profaning marks on the youth and beauty of Miss Fairlie’s face, then, and then only, Anne Catherick and she would be the twin-sisters of chance resemblance, the living reflections of one another.”

— Wilkie Collins

64. “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

65. “Persons and Things do turn up so vexatiously in this life, and will in a manner insist on being noticed.”

— Wilkie Collins

66. “I have always maintained that the one important phenomenon presented by modern society is – the enormous prosperity of Fools.”

— Wilkie Collins

67. “I have heard, as everybody else has, of a spirit’s haunting a house ; but I have had my own personal experience of a house’s haunting a spirit.”

— Wilkie Collins

68. “There is nothing serious in mortality!”

— Wilkie Collins

69. “I started to my feet as suddenly as if he had struck me. If I had been a man, I would have knocked him down on the threshold of his own door, and have left his house, never on any earthly consideration to enter it again. But I was only a woman – and I loved his wife so dearly!”

— Wilkie Collins

70. “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

71. “Perhaps you think you see a certain contradiction here? In that case, a word in your ear. Study your wife closely, for the next four-and-twenty hours. If your good lady doesn’t exhibit something in the shape of a contradiction in that time, Heaven help you! – you have married a monster.”

— Wilkie Collins

72. “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

73. “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.”

— Wilkie Collins

74. “There’s a bottom of good sense, Mr. Franklin, in our conduct to our mothers, when they first start us on the journey of life. We are all of us more or less unwilling to be brought into the world. And we are all of us right.”

— Wilkie Collins

75. “Except in this ignorant and material century, men have always worn precious stuffs and beautiful colours as well as women.”

— Wilkie Collins

76. “People in low life have no such privilege. Necessity, which spares our betters, has no pity on us. We learn to put our feelings back into ourselves, and to jog on with our duties as patiently as may be.”

— Wilkie Collins

77. “When a sensible woman has a reasonable question put to her, and evades it by a flippant answer, it is a sure sign, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, that she has something to conceal.”

— Wilkie Collins

78. “So the ghostly figure which has haunted these pages, as it haunted my life, goes down into the impenetrable gloom. Like a shadow she first came to me in the loneliness of the night. Like a shadow she passes away in the loneliness of the dead.”

— Wilkie Collins

79. “What lurking temptations to forbidden tenderness find their finding-places in a woman’s dressing-gown, when she is alone in her room at night!”

— Wilkie Collins

80. “There was no mistaking the expression on her face. I inspired her with the strongest emotions of abhorrence and disgust. Let me not be vain enough to say that no woman had ever looked at me in this manner before. I will only venture on the more modest assertion that no woman had ever let me perceive it yet.”

— Wilkie Collins

81. “Now I saw, though too late, the Folly of beginning a Work before we count the Cost, and before we judge rightly of our own Strength to go through with it.” Only.”

— Wilkie Collins

82. “He was in that state of highly respectful sulkiness which is peculiar to English servants.”

— Wilkie Collins

83. “I used to attend scientific experiments when I was a girl at school. They invariably ended in an explosion. If Mr. Jennings will be so very kind, I should like to be warned of the explosion this time. With a view to getting it over, if possible, before I go to bed.”

— Wilkie Collins

84. “IT wanted little more than a fortnight to Christmas; but the weather showed no signs yet of the frost and snow, conventionally associated with the coming season. The atmosphere was unnaturally warm, and the old year was dying feebly in sapping rain and enervating mist.”

— Wilkie Collins

85. “Oh, my young friends and fellow sinners! beware of presuming to exercise your poor carnal reason. Oh, be morally tidy! Let your faith be as your stockings, and your stockings as your faith. Both ever spotless, and both ready to put on at a moment’s notice!”

— Wilkie Collins

86. “Even lawyers have hearts, and mine ached a little as I took leave of her. The.”

— Wilkie Collins

87. “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

88. “The most easily deteriorated of all the moral qualities is the quality called ‘conscience.’ In one state of a man’s mind, his conscience is the severest judge that can pass sentence on him. In another state, he and his conscience are on the best possible terms with each other in the comfortable capacity of accomplices.”

— Wilkie Collins

89. “You live a great deal too much in the society of women. And you have contracted two very bad habits in consequence. You have learnt to talk nonsense seriously, and you have got into a way of telling fibs for the pleasure of telling them.”

— Wilkie Collins

90. “I hope I take up the cause of all oppressed people rather warmly.”

— Wilkie Collins

91. “Now, Betteredge, exert those sharp wits of yours, and observe the conclusion to which the Colonel’s instructions point!” I instantly exerted my wits. They were of the slovenly English sort; and they consequently muddled it all.”

— Wilkie Collins

92. “Leave me my delusion, dearest! I must have that to cherish, and to comfort me, if I have nothing else!”

— Wilkie Collins

93. “The clouds were wild in the western heaven, and the wind blew chill from the sea. Far as the shore was, the sound of the surf swept over the intervening moorland, and beat drearily in my ears when I entered the churchyard.”

— Wilkie Collins

94. “Ah! How much happiness there is in life if we will only have the patience to wait for it.”

— Wilkie Collins

95. “It lasted more or less through the night; and then intermitted, at that terrible time in the early morning – from two o’clock to five – when the vital energies even of the healthiest of us are at their lowest. It is then that Death gathers in his human harvest most abundantly. It was then that Death and I fought our fight over the bed, which should have the man who lay on it.”

— Wilkie Collins

96. “I wonder whether the gentlemen who make a business and a living out of writing books, ever find their own selves getting in the way of their subjects, like me?”

— Wilkie Collins

97. “Magdalen drew further and further back. A twig from a tree near caught her cloak; she turned petulantly, broke it off, and threw it on the ground. “What right have you to question me?” she broke out on a sudden. “Whether I like Frank, or whether I don’t, what interest is it of yours?” As she said the words, she abruptly stepped forward to pass her sister and return to the house.”

— Wilkie Collins

98. “How much happier we should be,′ she thought to herself sadly, ’if we never grew up!”

— Wilkie Collins

99. “Inevitably. But women, as you may have observed, have no principles. My family don’t feel my pangs of conscience. The end being to bring you and Rachel together again, my wife and daughters pass over the means employed to gain it, as composedly as if they were Jesuits.” “I.”

— Wilkie Collins

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

— Wilkie Collins