Quotes from Wilkie Collins

God be praised for His mercy! I have seen a little sunshine-- I have had a happy time.

One of the strangest peculiarities in the humbler ranks of the English people, is the sort of solemn relish which they have for talking of their own misfortunes. To be the objects of a calamity of any kind, seems to raise them in their own estimations.

yorgun gözlerimi kapay?p çevremdeki dünyay?, tepemdeki güneÅŸi unuttum. Onun bana geri gelmesini bekledim. Ah, sevgilim! Sevgilim! Art?k sana içimi dökebilirim! Sanki daha dün ayr?lm???z gibi, sanki daha dün senin o güzel elin elimdeydi, sanki en son dün görmüÅŸtüm seni. Sevgilim! Sevgilim!

I wonder whether the foregoing pages of my writing-paper have been torn to pieces and thrown into the waste-paper basket? You wouldn't litter the carpet. No. I may be torn in pieces, but I do you justice for all that.

Noel Vanstone [...] composed himself to meet the coming ordeal, with reclining head and grasping hands - in the position familiarly associated to all civilized humanity with a seat in a dentist's chair.

We were not a happy couple, and not a miserable couple. We were six of one and half-a-dozen of the other. 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 upstairs, 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.

On hearing these dreadful words my daughter Penelope said she didn't know what prevented her heart from flying straight out of her. I thought privately it might have been her stays.

I found her at the head of the sofa when I returned. She was just touching his forehead with her lips. I shook my head as soberly as I could and pointed to her chair. She looked back at me with a bright smile and a charming colour in her face. You would have done it, she whispered. In my place.

the harder the struggle for existence among the men and women about us, the less the risk of their having the time or taking the pains to notice chance strangers who came among them.

While it was impossible to be formal and reserved in her company, it was more than impossible to take the faintest vestige of a liberty with her, even in thought. I felt this instinctively, even while I caught the infection of her own bright gaiety of spirits--even while I did my best to answer her in her own frank, lively way.

Some people in my position would now have felt rather crestfallen, and would have begun to think that they had made a very foolish mistake. Not the faintest misgiving of any kind troubled me. I did not feel in the slightest degree depreciated in my own estimation. And even now, after a lapse of three hours, my mind remains, I am happy to say, in the same calm and hopeful condition.

My uncle is right," she said. "I have caused trouble and anxiety enough to you, and to all about me. Let me cause no more, Marian—let Sir Percival decide." I

Oh death, thou hast thy sting! oh, grave, thou hast thy victory!

Mr. Bruff, you have no more imagination than a cow!" "A cow is a very useful animal, Mr. Blake," said the lawyer.

It is true that love soars higher than the other passions; but it can stoop lower as well.

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.

Very strange! he said to himself, vacantly. It's like a scene in a novel—it's like nothing in real life. He

tenait, une vive clarté rejaillissait sur ses

You see I don't think much of my own sex, Mr. Hartright—which will you have, tea or coffee?—no woman does think much of her own sex, although few of them confess it as freely as I do.

I set down here Mr. Franklin's careless question, and my foolish answer, as a consolation and encouragement to all stupid people — it being, as I have remarked, a great satisfaction to our inferior fellow-creatures to find that their betters are, on occasions, no brighter than they are.

The secret which that confession discloses should be told with little effort, for it has indirectly escaped me already. The poor weak words, which have failed to describe Miss Fairlie, have succeeded in betraying the sensations she awakened in me. It is so with us all. Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service. I loved her.

Some of us rush through life, and some of us saunter through life. Mrs. Vesey SAT through life.

No man under heaven deserves these sacrifices from us women. Men! They are the enemies of our innocence and our peace—they drag us away from our parents' love and our sisters' friendship—they take us body and soul to themselves, and fasten our helpless lives to theirs as they chain up a dog to his kennel. And what does the best of them give us in return?

How can I thank you?" "I will tell you how. Don't blame me for what happens afterwards!