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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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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
Three
Compliment
Young
Lady
Play
Generation
Things
Wine
Men
None
Pay
Generations
Present

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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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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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But, ah me! where is the faultless human creature who can persevere in a good resolution, without sometimes failing and falling back?
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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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Some of us rush through life, and some of us saunter through life. Mrs Vesey sat through life.
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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.
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Pedants, who have the least knowledge to be proud of, are impelled most by vanity.
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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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I am not against hasty marriages where a mutual flame is fanned by an adequate income.
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Men ruin themselves headlong for unworthy women.
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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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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?
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The evening advanced. The shadows lengthened. The waters of the lake grew pitchy black. The gliding of the ghostly swans became rare and more rare.
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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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