Quotes from Wilkie Collins

Does it matter who we are, or what we keep or lose?

This is a matter of curiosity; and you have got a woman for your ally. Under such conditions success is certain, sooner or later.

People in high life have all the luxuries to themselves—among others, the luxury of indulging their feelings. People in low life have no such privilege.

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.

I began to doubt whether she might not be repenting of her engagement—just as young ladies often do, when repentance comes too late. On

A fair, delicate girl, in a pretty light dress, trifling with the leaves of a sketch-book, while she looks up from it with truthful, innocent blue eyes—that is all the drawing can say; all, perhaps, that even the deeper reach of thought and pen can say in their language, either.

Its title was, A Word With You On Your Cap-Ribbons. My

You may wonder,' I went on, 'how the event of your daughter's death can have been made the means of inflicting injury on another person.' 'No,' said Mrs. Catherick; 'I don't wonder at all. This appears to be your affair. You are interested in my affairs. I am not interested in yours.

Many men, many opinions, as one of the ancients said, before my time.

A confused sensation of having suddenly lost my familiarity with the past, without acquiring any additional clearness of idea in reference to the present or the future, took possession of my mind. Circumstances that were but a few days old, faded back in my memory, as if they had happened months and months since.

I said, No man is worth fretting for in that way. And she said, There are men worth dying for, Lucy, and he is one of them.

The solemn servant was far too highly trained to betray the slightest satisfaction.

Nada hay en este mundo, Betteredge, que se aparezca como una cosa probable, si no logramos vincularla con nuestra engañosa experiencia, y sólo creemos en lo novelesco cuando se halla estampado en letras de molde.

I think it will end here. When I can bear it no longer, I think it will end here.

One of our first amusements as children (if we have any imagination at all) is to get out of our own characters, and to try the characters of other personages as a change—to be fairies, to be queens, to be anything, in short, but what we really are.

All the woman flushed up in Marian's face as I spoke.

Don't let me think—that is all I ask now, Marian—don't let me think.

The woman never lived yet who could cast a true-love out of her heart because the object of that love was unworthy of her. All

But she made one serious mistake which very clever people in their intercourse with their intellectual inferiors are almost universally apt to commit—she trusted implicitly to the folly of a fool. She

Gracias a Dios soy yo un ser que reacciona orgánicamente por encima de la razón! (...) Aprovéchense, mis buenos amigos, se lo ruego, de este ejemplo. Se evitarán así muchas molestias enojosas. Cultiven la supremacía de los sentimientos sobre la razón y verán entonces cómo le cortan las garras a todo ser cuerdo que intente arañarlos, por el propio bien de ustedes.

Mi devoto amor por la verdad se halla, gracias a Dios, muy por encima de mi respeto por las personas.

You musn't talk of a young lady *belonging* to anybody, as if she was a piece of furniture, or money in the Three per Cent, or something of that sort.

mong the hundred thousand mysterious influences which a man exercises over a woman who loves him, I doubt if there is any more irresistible to her than the influence of his voice. I am not one of those women who shed tears on the smallest provocation: it is not in my temperament, I suppose. But when I heard that little natural change in his tone my mind went back (I can't say why) to the happy day when I first owned that I loved him. I burst out crying.

Grief has this that is noble in it—it accepts all sympathy, come whence it may. She