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

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Pedants, who have the least knowledge to be proud of, are impelled most by vanity.
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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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Except in this ignorant and material century, men have always worn precious stuffs and beautiful colours as well as women.
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I am (thank God) constitutionally superior to reason.
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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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Husbands and wives talk of the cares of matrimony, and bachelors and spinsters bear them.
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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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 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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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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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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No sensible man ever engages, unprepared, in a fencing match of words with a woman.
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The books - the generous friends who met me without suspicion - the merciful masters who never used me ill!
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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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