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No sensible man ever engages, unprepared, in a fencing match of words with a woman.

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
Woman
Women
Ever
Fencing
Men
Engages
Unprepared
Match
Sensible
Words

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Husbands and wives talk of the cares of matrimony, and bachelors and spinsters bear them.
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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 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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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 have noticed that the Christianity of a certain class of respectable people begins when they open their prayer-books at eleven o'clock on Sunday morning, and ends when they shut them up again at one o'clock on Sunday afternoon. Nothing so astonishes and insults Christians of this sort as reminding them of their Christianity on a week-day.
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It is the nature of truth to struggle to the light.
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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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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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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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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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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 have always maintained that the one important phenomenon presented by modern society is - the enormous prosperity of Fools.
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Men little know when they say hard things to us how well we remember them, and how much harm they do us.
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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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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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We neither know nor judge ourselves others may judge, but cannot know us. God alone judges and knows us.
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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.
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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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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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Except in this ignorant and material century, men have always worn precious stuffs and beautiful colours as well as women.
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