230 Quotes by Wilkie Collins

What lurking temptations to forbidden tenderness find their finding-places in a woman’s dressing-gown, when she is alone in her room at night!

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

You have heard of beautiful young ladies falling in love at first sight, and have thought it natural enough. But a housemaid out of a reformatory, with a plain face and a deformed shoulder, falling in love, at first sight, with a gentleman who comes on a visit to her mistress’s house, match me that, in the way of an absurdity, out of any story-book in Christendom, if you can! I.

Miss Fairlie laughed with a ready good-humour, which broke out as brightly as if it had been part of the sunshine above us, over her lovely face. “I.

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.

Here I am, with my book and my pencil – the latter not pointed so well as I could wish, but when Christians take leave of their senses, who is to expect that pencils will keep their points?

We don’t want genius in this country unless it is accompanied by respectability.

The sad truth is, I am a martyr to my own sense of order. All untidiness, all want of system and regularity, cause me the acutest irritation. My attention is distracted, my composure is upset;.

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.