Quotes from book
The Woman in White

Name: The Woman in White
Author: Wilkie Collins

Wilkie CollinsOriginal title The Woman in White (British English, 1860)

The Woman in White is Wilkie Collins's fifth published novel, written in 1859. It is considered to be among the first mystery novels and is widely regarded as one of the first in the genre of "sensation novels".

“Dont speak of tomorrow. Let the music speak to us tonight, in a happier language than ours.”

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

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

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

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

Source: The Woman in White

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

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

Source: The Woman in White

“Silence is safe.”

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

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?”

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

Source: The Woman in White

“Don't let me think.”

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

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.”

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

Source: The Woman in White

“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.”

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

Volume 1 [Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1860] ( p. 336 https://books.google.com/books?id=rszxUvpszaMC&pg=PA336) <br class="br">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) <br class="br">Source: The Woman in White (1859)

“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.”

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

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)

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

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

Source: The Woman in White

“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.”

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

Source: The Woman in White

“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.”

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

Source: The Woman in White

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

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

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.”

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

Source: The Woman in White

“… 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.”

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

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.”

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

Source: The Woman in White

“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.”

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

Source: The Woman in White

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

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

Source: The Woman in White

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

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

Volume II [Tauchnitz, 1860] ( p. 226 https://books.google.com/books?id=xAm2X8YfpJIC&pg=PA226) <br class="br">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) <br class="br">Source: The Woman in White (1859)

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

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

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