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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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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
Dangerous
Lowest
Reading
Literary
Everyone
Dull
Writing
Luxury
Years
Species
Time
Waste
People
Decided
Exertion
Novel
Utter

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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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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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Some of us rush through life, and some of us saunter through life. Mrs Vesey sat through life.
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Men ruin themselves headlong for unworthy women.
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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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Yes! the books - the generous friends who met me without suspicion - the merciful masters who never used me ill! The only years of my life that I can look back on with something like pride... Early and late, through the long winter nights and the quiet summer days, I drank at the fountain of knowledge, and never wearied of the draught.
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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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...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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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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I am not against hasty marriages where a mutual flame is fanned by an adequate income.
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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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The best men are not consistent in good-- why should the worst men be consistent in evil.
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The fool's crime is the crime that is found out and the wise man's crime is the crime that is not found out.
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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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Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service.
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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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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 (thank God) constitutionally superior to reason.
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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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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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