Top 160 Wilkie Collins Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “We meet as mortal enemies hereafter – let us, like gallant gentlemen, exchange polite attentions in the meantime.”

— Wilkie Collins

103. “How inestimably important in its moral results – and therefore how praiseworthy in itself – is the act of eating and drinking! The social virtues center in the stomach. A man who is not a better husband, father, and brother after dinner than before is, digestively speaking, an incurably vicious man.”

— Wilkie Collins

104. “Human life, Mr. Betteredge, is a sort of target – misfortune is always firing at it, and always hitting the mark.”

— Wilkie Collins

105. “The explanation has been written already in the three words that were many enough, and plain enough, for my confession. I loved her.”

— Wilkie Collins

106. “But in these modern times it may be decidedly asserted as a fact, that vice, in accomplishing the vast majority of its seductions, uses no disguise at all; appears impudently in its naked deformity; and, instead of horrifying all beholders, in accordance with the prediction of the classical satirist, absolutely attracts a much more numerous congregation of worshippers than has ever yet been brought together by the divinest beauties that virtue can display for the allurement of mankind.”

— Wilkie Collins

107. “One of the rarest of all the intellectual accomplishments that a man can possess is the grand faculty of arranging his ideas.”

— Wilkie Collins

108. “Lovely eyes in colour, lovely eyes in form – large and tender and quietly thoughtful – but beautiful above all things in the clear truthfulness of look that dwells in their inmost depths, and shines through all their changes of expression with the light of a purer and a better world.”

— Wilkie Collins

109. “We don’t want genius in this country unless it is accompanied by respectability.”

— Wilkie Collins

110. “How can you expect four women to dine together alone every day, and not quarrel?”

— Wilkie Collins

111. “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

112. “One after another those words travelled over my memory, repeating themselves again and again with a wearisome, mechanical reiteration. I was roused from what felt like a trance of many hours – from what was really, no doubt, the pause of a few moments only – by a voice calling to me.”

— Wilkie Collins

113. “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

114. “It is quite possible that I may be altogether wrong in this idea. My own impression, however, is, that I am right.”

— Wilkie Collins

115. “However, don’t despair, Mr. Hartright. This is a matter of curiosity; and you have got a woman for your ally. Under such conditions success is certain, sooner or later.”

— Wilkie Collins

116. “Let us say your wife dies – –.”

— Wilkie Collins

117. “Here I am, with my book and my pencil – the latter not pointed so well as I could wish, but when Christians take leave of their senses, who is to expect that pencils will keep their points?”

— Wilkie Collins

118. “I should have looked into my own heart, and found this new growth springing up there, and plucked it out while it was young.”

— Wilkie Collins

119. “I constantly see old people flushed and excited by the prospect of some anticipated pleasure which altogether fails to ruffle the tranquillity of their serene grandchildren. Are we, I wonder, quite such genuine boys and girls now as our seniors were in their time? Has the great advance in education taken rather too long a stride;.”

— Wilkie Collins

120. “The cook looked as if she could grill Mr. Superintendent alive on a furnace, and the other women looked as if they could eat him when he was done.”

— Wilkie Collins

121. “Our capacity of appreciating the beauties of the earth we live on is, in truth, one of the civilised accomplishments which we all learn as an Art; and, more, that very capacity is rarely practised by any of us except when our minds are most indolent and most unoccupied.”

— Wilkie Collins

122. “A young man who plays his part in society by looking on in green spectacles, and listening with a sickly smile, may be a prodigy of intellect and a mine of virtue, but he is hardly, perhaps, the right sort of man to have at a picnic.”

— Wilkie Collins

123. “I must really rest a little before I can get on any farther. When I have reclined for a few minutes, with my eyes closed, and when Louis has refreshed my poor aching temples with a little eau-de-Cologne, I may be able to proceed.”

— Wilkie Collins

124. “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 of, and your hands something that they must do.”

— Wilkie Collins

125. “Whenever a woman tries to put you out of a temper, turn the tables, and put HER out of temper instead. They are generally prepared for every effort you can make in your own defence, but that.”

— Wilkie Collins

126. “I did what you would probably have done in my place. I modestly declared myself to be quite unequal to the task imposed upon me – and I privately felt, all the time, that I was quite clever enough to perform it.”

— Wilkie Collins

127. “But you make allowances for women; we all talk nonsense. Good.”

— Wilkie Collins

128. “After the lapse of a minute, I roused my manhood, and opened the door.”

— Wilkie Collins

129. “Ah! he would have found it out fast enough if she had been nice-looking. The ugly women have a bad time of it in this world; let’s hope it will be made up to them in another.”

— Wilkie Collins

130. “How it was I don’t understand, but we always seemed to be getting, with the best of motives, in one another’s way. When I wanted to go up-stairs, there was my wife coming down; or when my wife wanted to go down, there was I coming up. That is married life, according to my experience of it.”

— Wilkie Collins

131. “Here is one more book that depicts the struggle of a human creature, under those opposing influences of Good and Evil, which we have all felt, which we have all known.”

— Wilkie Collins

132. “In my ordinary evening costume I took up the room of three men at least. In my present dress, when it was held close about me, no man could have passed through the narrowest spaces more easily than I.”

— Wilkie Collins

133. “Don’t let me think.”

— Wilkie Collins

134. “To-day we love, what to-morrow we hate.”

— Wilkie Collins

135. “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

136. “She put the Trust into her sister’s hand. Magdalen took it from her mechanically. “You!” she said, looking at her sister with the remembrance of all that she had vainly ventured, of all that she had vainly suffered, at St. Crux – “you have found it!”

— Wilkie Collins

137. “As a general rule, political talk appears to me to be of all talk the most dreary and the most profitless.”

— Wilkie Collins

138. “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.”

— Wilkie Collins

139. “Are you free of each other, pretty Mrs. Valeria, by common consent of both parties?”

— Wilkie Collins

140. “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.”

— Wilkie Collins

141. “Her heart beat as if it would suffocate her. She had kept her promise bravely. The whole story of her life, from the time of the home-wreck at Combe-Raven to the time when she had destroyed the Secret Trust in her sister’s presence, had been all laid before him. Nothing that she had done, nothing even that she had thought, had been concealed from his knowledge.”

— Wilkie Collins

142. “The mountain-path of Action is no longer a path for me; my future hope pauses with my present happiness in the shadowed valley of Repose.”

— Wilkie Collins

143. “He started up, and wrung my hand in quite an ecstasy of gratitude. How I do hate people who can only express their feelings by hurting other people’s hand.”

— Wilkie Collins

144. “Observe, dear lady, what a light is dying on the trees! Does it penetrate your heart, as it penetrates mine?”

— Wilkie Collins

145. “Cultivate a superiority to reason, and see how you pare the claws of all the sensible people when they try to scratch you for your own good!”

— Wilkie Collins

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

— Wilkie Collins

147. “Don’t doubt my courage, Walter, it’s my weakness that cries, not me.”

— Wilkie Collins

148. “The days passed on, the weeks passed on, and the track of the golden autumn wound its bright way visibly through the green summer of the trees.”

— Wilkie Collins

149. “If you are as tired of reading this narrative as I am of writing it – Lord, how we shall enjoy ourselves on both sides a few pages further on!”

— Wilkie Collins

150. “Ha, Mr. Betteredge, the day is not far off when the poor will rise against the rich. I pray Heaven they may begin with him. I pray Heaven they may begin with him.”

— Wilkie Collins