Quotes from Wilkie Collins

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;

I smell your cigar. Delicious! Give me one directly.

The quiet twilight was still trembling on the topmost ridges of the heath; and the view of London below me had sunk into a black gulf in the shadow of the cloudy night, when I stood before the gate of my mother's cottage.

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.

The deserts of Arabia are innocent of our civilised desolation-the ruins of Palestine are incapable of our modern gloom!

If he was right, here was our quiet English house suddenly invaded by a devilish Indian Diamond - bringing after it a conspiracy of living rogues, set loose on us by the vengeance of a dead man.

My dear friend! what is there extraordinary in that? They are all in love with some other man. Who gets the first of a woman's heart? In all my experience I have never yet met with the man who was Number One. Number Two, sometimes. Number Three, Four, Five, often. Number One, never! He exists, of course—but, I have not met with him.

The ugly women have a bad time of it in this world; let's hope it will be made up to them in another.

I have degraded myself by ever thinking of him as my husband.

If the machinery of the Law could be depended on to fathom every case of suspicion, and to conduct every process of inquiry, with moderate assistance only from the lubricating influences of oil of gold, the events which fill these pages might have claimed their share of the public attention in a Court of Justice.

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!

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

We had our breakfast--whatever happens in a house, robbery or murder, it doesn't matter, you must have your breakfast.

Think of me pretending to be a lawyer, and not knowing how to look low enough!

the long luxury of your own freedom has made you incapable of doing us justice now.

There are three things that none of the young men of the present generation can do. They can't sit over their wine, they can't play at whist, and they can't pay a lady a compliment.

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.

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.

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.

I turned towards the garden when the door had closed on her. Miss Halcombe was standing with her hat in her hand, and her shawl over her arm, by the large window that led out to the lawn, and was looking at me attentively.

The girl ginned again, more cheerfully than ever. 'Bless you, miss! Baxter's the keeper; and when he finds strange dogs hunting about, he takes and shoots 'em. It's keeper's dooty, miss. I think that dog will die. Here's where he's been shot, ain't it? That's Baxter's doings, that is. Baxter's doings, miss, and Baxter's dooty.' It was almost wicked enough to wish that Baxter had shot the housemaid instead of the dog.

He has trifled with the sacred memory of my husband, thought the Professor's widow. On my life and honor, I will make him pay for it.

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.

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.