230 Quotes by Wilkie Collins

Not a word had dropped from my lips, or from hers, that could unsettle either of us – and yet the same unacknowledged sense of embarrassment made us shrink alike from meeting one another alone.

But compare the hardest day’s work you ever did with the idleness that splits flowers and pokes its way into spiders’ stomachs, and thank your stars that your head has got something it must think of, and your hands something that they must do.

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?

There’s a bottom of good sense, Mr. Franklin, in our conduct to our mothers, when they first start us on the journey of life. We are all of us more or less unwilling to be brought into the world. And we are all of us right.

In my youth, I should have chafed and fretted under the irritation of my own unreasonable state of mind. In my age, I knew better, and went out philosophically to walk it off.

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.

Magdalen drew further and further back. A twig from a tree near caught her cloak; she turned petulantly, broke it off, and threw it on the ground. “What right have you to question me?” she broke out on a sudden. “Whether I like Frank, or whether I don’t, what interest is it of yours?” As she said the words, she abruptly stepped forward to pass her sister and return to the house.

We meet as mortal enemies hereafter – let us, like gallant gentlemen, exchange polite attentions in the meantime.

One of the rarest of all the intellectual accomplishments that a man can possess is the grand faculty of arranging his ideas.