Wilkie Collins Quotes

1824–1889 England

William Wilkie Collins (January 8, 1824 – September 23, 1889) was an English novelist, playwright and writer of short stories. He was a pioneer in the writing of detective fiction.

England
Essayists
Journalists
Novelists
Playwrights

Also known as: Collins, Wilkie, The moonstone

Random Wilkie Collins quote

18 quotes

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

The Moonstone (1868)

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

People who read stories are said to have excitable brains.

Men ruin themselves headlong for unworthy women.

I am not against hasty marriages, where a mutual flame is fanned by an adequate income.

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

The Woman in White (1859)

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

The Woman in White (1859)

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

The Moonstone (1868)

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.

The Woman in White (1859)

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

The Woman in White (1859)

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

The Law and the Lady (1875)

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.

The Woman in White (1859)

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

The Moonstone (1868)

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.

The Moonstone (1868)

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.

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.

"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."

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.

The Law and the Lady (1875)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Wilkie Collins (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.