Quotes from Wilkie Collins

The past and present rose side by side, at that supreme moment — and the contrast shook me.

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.

Forgive me, dear Mr. Troy! I am very unhappy, and very unreasonable—but I am only a woman, and you must not expect too much from me.

Miss Fairlie laughed with a ready good-humour, which broke out as brightly as if it had been part of the sunshine above us, over her lovely face. I

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

Again I say it, therefore walk, and be merry; walk, and be healthy; walk, and be your own master! walk, to enjoy, to observe, to improve, as no riders can! walk, and you are the best peripatetic impersonation of holiday enjoyment that is to be met with on the surface of this work-a-day world!

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.

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!

Shall I confess it, Mr. Hartright? 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.

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

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

I hope Mr. Hartright will pay me no compliments,' said Miss Fairlie, as we all left the summer-house. 'May I venture to inquire why you express that hope?' I asked. 'Because I shall believe all that you say to me,' she answered, simply. In those few words she unconsciously gave me the key to her whole character; to that generous trust in others which, in her nature, grew innocently out of the sense of her own truth. I only knew it intuitively then. I know it by experience now.

Don't doubt my courage, Walter, it's my weakness that cries, not me.

I wonder how Blackwater Park will look in the daytime? I don't altogether like it by night.

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!.

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.

The tone in which those words were spoken might have melted a stone. But, oh dear, what is the hardness of stone? Nothing, compared to the hardness of the unregenerate human heart!

You're the most extraordinary man I ever met with. One would think you had done nothing all your life but take people in. Captain Wragge received that unconscious tribute to his native genius with the complacency of a man who felt that he thoroughly deserved it.

But, as to Mr. Franklin's bedroom (if THAT is to be put back to what it was before), I want to know who is responsible for keeping it in a perpetual state of litter, no matter how often it may be set right--his trousers here, his towel there, and his French novels everywhere. I say, who is responsible for untidying the tidiness of Mr. Franklin's room, him or me?

On all ordinary occasions Magdalen's appetite would have terrified those feeble sentimentalists, who affect to ignore the all-important influence which female feeding exerts in the production of female beauty.

What lurking temptations to forbidden tenderness find their hiding-places in a woman's dressing-gown, when she is alone in her room at night! With

expression—nothing

The course of this narrative describes the return of a disembodied spirit to earth, and leads the reader on new and strange ground.

The kind sorrowful eyes looked at me, for a moment, with the prescient sadness of a coming and a long farewell. I felt the answering pang in my own heart—the pang that told me I must lose her soon, and love her the more unchangeably for the loss.