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

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
Injury
Service
Words
Dwarfs
Giants

More quotes by Wilkie Collins

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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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I have always maintained that the one important phenomenon presented by modern society is - the enormous prosperity of Fools.
Wilkie Collins
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No sensible man ever engages, unprepared, in a fencing match of words with a woman.
Wilkie Collins
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It is one of my rules in life, never to notice what I don't understand.
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Except in this ignorant and material century, men have always worn precious stuffs and beautiful colours as well as women.
Wilkie Collins
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Is there any wilderness of sand in the deserts of Arabia, is there any prospect of desolation among the ruins of Palestine, which can rival the repelling effect on the eye, and the depressing influence on the mind, of an English country town in the first stage of its existence, and in the transition state of its prosperity?
Wilkie Collins
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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.
Wilkie Collins
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Men little know when they say hard things to us how well we remember them, and how much harm they do us.
Wilkie Collins
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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.
Wilkie Collins
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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.
Wilkie Collins
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This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve.
Wilkie Collins
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Where is the woman who has ever really torn from her heart the image that has been once fixed in it by a true love? Books tell us that such unearthly creatures have existed - but what does our own experiences say in answer to books?
Wilkie Collins
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My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody.
Wilkie Collins
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Let the music speak to us of tonight, in a happier language than our own.
Wilkie Collins
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I am a citizen of the world, and I have met, in my time, with so many different sorts of virtue, that I am puzzled, in my old age, to say which is the right sort and which is the wrong.
Wilkie Collins
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But, ah me! where is the faultless human creature who can persevere in a good resolution, without sometimes failing and falling back?
Wilkie Collins
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Men ruin themselves headlong for unworthy women.
Wilkie Collins
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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.
Wilkie Collins
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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.
Wilkie Collins
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She looked so irresistibly beautiful as she said those brave words that no man alive could have steel his heart against her.
Wilkie Collins