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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
Words
Dwarfs
Giants
Injury
Service

More quotes by Wilkie Collins

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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.
Wilkie Collins
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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 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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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!
Wilkie Collins
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Men ruin themselves headlong for unworthy women.
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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Well may your heart believe the truths Well may your heart believe the truths I tell 'Tis virtue makes the bliss, where'er we dwell.
Wilkie Collins
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Some of us rush through life, and some of us saunter through life. Mrs Vesey sat through life.
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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And earth was heaven a little the worse for wear. And heaven was earth, done up again to look like new.
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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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.
Wilkie Collins
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It is one of my rules in life, never to notice what I don't understand.
Wilkie Collins
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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.
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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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.
Wilkie Collins
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The horrid mystery hanging over us in this house gets into my head like liquor, and makes me wild.
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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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 have always maintained that the one important phenomenon presented by modern society is - the enormous prosperity of Fools.
Wilkie Collins