Wilkie Collins Quotes

“Your tears come easy, when you're young, and beginning the world. Your tears come easy, when you're old, and leaving it.”

Variant: Let the music speak to us of tonight, in a happier language than our own.
Source: The Woman in White

“The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.”

[Street, 1868] ( p. 86 https://books.google.com/books?id=sAqXBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA82) Also in Soulsalsa: 17 Surprising Steps for Godly Living in the 21st Century https://books.google.com/books?id=E2S3nWp-lAgC&pg=PT61 by Leonard Sweet [Zondervan, 2009, ISBN 0-310-83380-9] Source: The Moonstone (1868)

“She looked so irresistibly beautiful as she said those brave words that no man alive could have steel his heart against her.”

Source: My Miscellanies

“Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service.”

Source: The Woman in White

“Where is the woman who has ever really torn from her heart the image that has been once fixed in it by a true love? Books tell us that such unearthly creatures have existed - but what does our own experiences say in answer to books?”

Source: The Woman in White

“I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story; and I have never believed that the novelist who properly performed this first condition of his art, was in danger, on that account, of neglecting the delineation of character — for this plain reason, that the effect produced, by any narrative of events is essentially dependent, not on the events themselves, but on the human interest which is directly connected with them. It may be possible in novel-writing to present characters successfully without telling a story; but it is not possible to tell a story successfully without presenting characters: their existence, as recognizable realities, being the sole condition on which the story can be effectively told. The only narrative which can hope to lay a strong hold on the attention of readers is a narrative which interests them about men and women — for the perfectly obvious reasons that they are men and women themselves.”

Source: The Woman in White

Wilkie Collins Quotes about men

“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 wist; and they can't pay a lady a compliment.”

Source: Collins explaining what he calls the literary principal guiding him, in the preface of the second edition of The Woman in White. Also in Reality's Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins by Maria K. Bachman & Don Richard Cox [University of Tennessee Press, 2003, ISBN 1-572-33274-3] ( p. xiv https://books.google.com/books?id=_X8AlmIp0dwC&pg=PR14)

“The best men are not consistent in good—why should the worst men be consistent in evil?”

Source: The Woman in White

“Men ruin themselves headlong for unworthy women.”

Source: The Woman in White

Wilkie Collins book Man and Wife

Man and Wife - Vol. II [Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1870] ( p. 235 https://books.google.com/books?id=Dp-ZFYLTW6QC&pg=PA235) Also in Wilkie Collins: Man of Mystery and Imagination by Alexander Grinstein [International Universities Press, 2003, 0-823-66681-6] (p. 155)

“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.”

Wilkie Collins book The Law and the Lady

Vol. I [Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1860] ( p. 194 https://books.google.com/books?id=wUN2KP79lhUC&pg=PA194) Also in The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction edited by Andrew Mangham [Cambridge University Press, 2013, ISBN 1-107-51169-0] ( p. 82 https://books.google.com/books?id=rQZCAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA82) The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins by Catherine Peters [Princeton University Press, 2014, ISBN 1-400-86345-7] ( p. 224 https://books.google.com/books?id=T0AABAAAQBAJ&pg=PA224) Cemetery of the Murdered Daughters: Feminism, History, and Ingeborg Bachmann by Sara Lennox [University of Massachusetts Press, 2006, ISBN 1-558-49552-5] ( p. 227 https://books.google.com/books?id=_9VjDtk5ss4C&pg=PA227) The Law and the Lady (1875)

Wilkie Collins Quotes

“The books - the generous friends who met me without suspicion - the merciful masters who never used me ill!”

Wilkie Collins book Armadale

Source: Armadale

“My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody.”

“Any woman who is sure of her own wits, is a match, at any time, for a man who is not sure of his own temper.”

Volume II [Tauchnitz, 1860] ( p. 226 https://books.google.com/books?id=xAm2X8YfpJIC&pg=PA226) Also in The Secret Ingredient by Laura Schaefer [Simon & Schuster, 2012, ISBN 1-442-41960-1] ( p. 169 https://books.google.com/books?id=o1ctj37QuikC&pg=PA169) Source: The Woman in White (1859)

“No sensible man ever engages, unprepared, in a fencing match of words with a woman.”

Volume 1 [Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1860] ( p. 336 https://books.google.com/books?id=rszxUvpszaMC&pg=PA336) Also in The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins by Catherine Peters ( p. 224 https://books.google.com/books?id=T0AABAAAQBAJ&pg=PA224) Source: The Woman in White (1859)

“Women can resist a man's love, a man's fame, a man's personal appearance, and a man's money, but they cannot resist a man's tongue when he knows how to talk to them.”

Source: The Woman in White

Source: The Woman in White

“Silence is safe.”

“Some of us rush through life and some of us saunter through life. Mrs. Vesey sat through life.”

Source: The Woman in White

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

Source: The Woman in White

“I am thinking,’ he remarked quietly, ’whether I shall add to the disorder in this room, by scattering your brains about the fireplace.”

Also in Recipes from an Edwardian Country House: A Stately English Home Shares Its Classic Tastes by Laura Schaefer [Simon & Schuster, 2013, ISBN 1-476-73033-4] ( p. 22 https://books.google.com/books?id=zZPzAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA22) Source: The Moonstone [Street, 1868] ( p. 49 https://books.google.com/books?id=FmsOAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA49).

“I say what other people only think, and when all the rest of the world is in a conspiracy to accept the mask for the true face, mine is the rash hand that tears off the plump pasteboard, and shows the bare bones beneath.”

Source: The Woman in White

“The fool's crime is the crime that is found out and the wise man's crime is the crime that is not found out.”

Source: The Woman in White

“This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve.”

Source: The Woman in White

“I am nothing but a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man.”

Source: The Woman in White

Volume II [Tauchnitz,
Source: The Woman in White (1859)

“Don't let me think.”

“… it will always remain my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all.”

Source: The Woman in White

“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.”

Source: The Woman in White

“People who read stories are said to have excitable brains.”

Source: The Woman in White

“Rosanna Spearman had been a thief, and not being of the sort that get up Companies in the City, and rob from thousands, instead of only robbing from one, the law laid hold of her, and the prison and the reformatory followed the lead of the law.”

Heart and Science: A Story of the Present Time - Vol. II [Bernhard Tauchnitz] ( p. 57 https://books.google.com/books?id=sKYzAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA57) Also in Wilkie Collins: An Illustrated Guide by Andrew Collins & Catherine Peters [Oxford University Press, 1998] (p. 139)

“I confess I have often fancied myself transformed into some other person, and have felt a certian pleasure in seeing myself in my new chracter. 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.”

[Street, 1868] ( p. 54 https://books.google.com/books?id=FmsOAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA18) Also in Convict Voices: Women, Class, and Writing about Prison in Nineteenth-Century England by Anne Schwan [University of New Hampshire Press, 2014, ISBN 1611686725] ( p. 82 https://books.google.com/books?id=sAqXBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA82) The Moonstone (1868)

Wilkie Collins book The Law and the Lady

The Law and the Lady [Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1875] ( p. 195) Also in Gothic Returns in Collins, Dickens, Zola, and Hitchcock by Eleanor Salotto [Springer, 2016, ISBN 1-137-11770-2 https://books.google.com/books?id=qPmE-w86r0AC&pg=PA195 ( p. 39 https://books.google.com/books?id=recYDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA39) The Law and the Lady (1875)

“I have noticed that the Christianity of a certain class of respectable people begins when they open their prayer-books at eleven o'clock on Sunday morning, and ends when they shut them up again at one o'clock on Sunday afternoon. Nothing so astonishes and insults Christians of this sort as reminding them of their Christianity on a week-day.”

Wilkie Collins book Armadale

Armadale - Vol. II [Collier, 1886] ( p. 130 https://books.google.com/books?id=v7sBAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA130) Also in Literature and Religion in Mid-Victorian England: From Dickens to Eliot by Carolyn Oulton [Springer, 2002, ISBN 0-230-50464-7] ( p. 136 https://books.google.com/books?id=abuADAAAQBAJ&pg=PA136)

“A very remarkable work… in the present state of light literature in England, a novel that actually tells a story. It 's quite incredible, I know. Try the book. It has another extraordinary merit, it isn't written by a woman.”

“The actions of human beings are not invariably governed by the laws of pure reason”

The Works of Wilkie Collins: The Black Robe [P.F. Collier, 1900] (p. 328) Also in Wilkie Collins: A Literary Life by Graham Law & Andrew Maunder [Springer, 2008, ISBN 0-230-22750-3] ( p. 15 https://books.google.com/books?id=kKyHDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA15&f=false)

Wilkie Collins book The Law and the Lady

Vol. I [Chatto & Windus, 1875] ( p. v https://books.google.com/books?id=_w83AAAAIAAJ&pg=PR5) Also in Gothic Returns in Collins, Dickens, Zola, and Hitchcock by Eleanor Salotto [Springer, 2016, ISBN 1-137-11770-2] ( p. 32 https://books.google.com/books?id=recYDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA32) The Law and the Lady (1875)

“Ask yourself if there is any explanation of the mystery of your own life and death.”

“Every human institution (Justice included) will stretch a little, if you only pull it the right way.”

The Haunted Hotel: A Mystery of Modern Venice [Rose-Belford, 1878] ( p.288 https://books.google.com/books?id=zyFjcZUO3CUC&pg=PA288) Also in The Supernatural And English fiction by Glen Cavaliero [Oxford University Press, 1995, ISBN 0-192-12607-5] (p. 39)

“The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared.”

[Street, 1868] ( p. 50 https://books.google.com/books?id=sAqXBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA50) Also in Plots of Opportunity: Representing Conspiracy in Victorian England by Albert D. Pionke [Ohio State University Press, 2004, 0-814-20948-3] ( p. 98 https://books.google.com/books?id=OH6ml-qUK7sC&pg=PA98) The Moonstone (1868)