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Habits of literary composition are perfectly familiar to me. One of the rarest of all the intellectual accomplishments that a man can possess is the grand faculty of arranging his ideas. Immense privilege! I possess it. Do you?

Wilkie Collins

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Wilkie Collins
Age: 65 †
Born: 1824
Born: January 8
Died: 1889
Died: September 23
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet Lawyer
Writer
London
England
William Collins
William Wilkie Collins
Ideas
Habits
Rarest
Men
Accomplishment
Arranging
Possess
Accomplishments
Perfectly
Composition
Familiar
Literary
Privilege
Immense
Intellectual
Grand
Habit
Faculty

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It is one of my rules in life, never to notice what I don't understand.
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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.
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It is the nature of truth to struggle to the light.
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...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.
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I haven't much time to be fond of anything ... but when I have a moment's fondness to bestow, most times ... the roses get it. I began my life among them in my father's nursery garden, and I shall end my life among them, if I can. Yes. One of these days (please God) I shall retire from catching thieves, and try my hand at growing roses.
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There are three things that none of the young men of the present generation can do.They can't sit over their winethey can't play at wistand they can't pay a lady a compliment.
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But I am a just man, even to my enemy - and I will acknowledge, beforehand, that they are cleverer brains than I thought them
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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.
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The future of English fiction may rest with this Unknown Public - a reading public of three millions which lies right out of the pale of true literary civilization - which is now waiting to be taught the difference between a good book and a bad.
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Some of us rush through life, and some of us saunter through life. Mrs Vesey sat through life.
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Yes! the books - the generous friends who met me without suspicion - the merciful masters who never used me ill! The only years of my life that I can look back on with something like pride... Early and late, through the long winter nights and the quiet summer days, I drank at the fountain of knowledge, and never wearied of the draught.
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I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.
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The law will argue any thing, with any body who will pay the law for the use of its brains and its time.
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Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service.
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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.
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I haven't much time to be fond of anything. But when I have a moment's fondness to bestow, most times the roses get it.
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Pedants, who have the least knowledge to be proud of, are impelled most by vanity.
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This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve.
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I never paid you a compliment, Rachel, in my life. Successful love may sometimes use the language of flattery, I admit. But hopeless love, dearest, always speaks the truth.
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Men ruin themselves headlong for unworthy women.
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