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

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This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve.
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I am a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man!
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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!
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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.
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Pedants, who have the least knowledge to be proud of, are impelled most by vanity.
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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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But I am a just man, even to my enemy - and I will acknowledge, beforehand, that they are cleverer brains than I thought them
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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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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 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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I am not against hasty marriages where a mutual flame is fanned by an adequate income.
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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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Except in this ignorant and material century, men have always worn precious stuffs and beautiful colours as well as women.
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Men ruin themselves headlong for unworthy women.
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I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.
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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 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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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 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 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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