Wilkie Collins
Wilkie Collins
William Wilkie Collinswas an English novelist, playwright, and short story writer. His best-known works are The Woman in White, No Name, Armadale, and The Moonstone. The last is considered the first modern English detective novel...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth8 January 1824
giants our-words injury
Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service.
sat
Some of us rush through life, and some of us saunter through life. Mrs Vesey sat through life.
lakes swans water
The evening advanced. The shadows lengthened. The waters of the lake grew pitchy black. The gliding of the ghostly swans became rare and more rare.
flames adequate income
I am not against hasty marriages where a mutual flame is fanned by an adequate income.
fiction stories opinion
I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.
house mystery liquor
The horrid mystery hanging over us in this house gets into my head like liquor, and makes me wild.
judging may knows
We neither know nor judge ourselves; others may judge, but cannot know us. God alone judges and knows us.
clever men brain
But I am a just man, even to my enemy - and I will acknowledge, beforehand, that they are cleverer brains than I thought them
betrayal brotherhood doubt
Not the shadow of a doubt crossed my mind of the purpose for which the Count had left the theatre. His escape from us, that evening, was beyond all question the preliminary only to his escape from London. The mark of the Brotherhood was on his arm-I felt as certain of it as if he had shown me the brand; and the betrayal of the Brotherhood was on his conscience-I had seen it in his recognition of Pesca.
house haunting spirit
I have heard, as everybody else has, of a spirit's haunting a house ; but I have had my own personal experience of a house's haunting a spirit.
spiritual lying expression
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. Sympathies that lie too deep for words, too deep almost for thoughts, are touched, at such times, by other charms than those which the senses feel and which the resources of expression can realise. The mystery which underlies the beauty of women is never raised above the reach of all expression until it has claimed kindred with the deeper mystery in our own souls.
vanity proud pedants
Pedants, who have the least knowledge to be proud of, are impelled most by vanity.
thankfulness thank-god reason
I am (thank God) constitutionally superior to reason.
wine men play
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.