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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
Dwarfs
Giants
Injury
Service
Words

More quotes by 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.
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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 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.
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Tears are scientifically described as a Secretion. I can understand that a secretion may be healthy or unhealthy, but I cannot see the interest of a secretion from a sentimental point of view.
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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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She looked so irresistibly beautiful as she said those brave words that no man alive could have steel his heart against her.
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Pedants, who have the least knowledge to be proud of, are impelled most by vanity.
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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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I say what other people only think, and when all the rest of the world is in a conspiracy to accept the mask for the true face, mine is the rash hand that tears off the plump pasteboard and shows the bare bones beneath.
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If I ever meet with the man who fulfills my ideal, I shall make it a condition of the marriage settlement, that I am to have chocolate under the pillow.
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The horrid mystery hanging over us in this house gets into my head like liquor, and makes me wild.
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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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It is the nature of truth to struggle to the light.
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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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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.
Wilkie Collins
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Women can resist a man's love, a man's fame, a man's personal appearance, and a man's money, but they cannot resist a man's tongue when he knows how to talk to them.
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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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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?
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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 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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