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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
Men
Accomplishment
Arranging
Possess
Accomplishments
Perfectly
Composition
Familiar
Literary
Privilege
Immense
Intellectual
Grand
Habit
Faculty
Ideas
Habits
Rarest

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Except in this ignorant and material century, men have always worn precious stuffs and beautiful colours as well as women.
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We had our breakfasts--whatever happens in a house, robbery or murder, it doesn't matter, you must have your breakfast.
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I have always maintained that the one important phenomenon presented by modern society is - the enormous prosperity of Fools.
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I am thinking,’ he remarked quietly, ’whether I shall add to the disorder in this room, by scattering your brains about the fireplace.
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I used to attend scientific experiments when I was a girl at school. They invariably ended in an explosion. If Mr. Jennings will be so very kind, I should like to be warned of the explosion this time. With a view to getting it over, if possible, before I go to bed.
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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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Let the music speak to us of tonight, in a happier language than our own.
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I roused myself from the book which I was dreaming over rather than reading, and left my chambers to meet the cool night air in the suburbs.
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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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The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.
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I am a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man!
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I am an average good Christian, when you don't push my Christianity too far. And all the rest of you—which is a great comfort—are, in this respect, much the same as I am.
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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.
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My business in life is to eat, drink, sleep, and die. Everything else is superfluity and I will have none of it.
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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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Husbands and wives talk of the cares of matrimony, and bachelors and spinsters bear them.
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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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We neither know nor judge ourselves others may judge, but cannot know us. God alone judges and knows us.
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No sensible man ever engages, unprepared, in a fencing match of words with a woman.
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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!
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