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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
Match
Sensible
Words
Woman
Women
Ever
Fencing
Men
Engages
Unprepared

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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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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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I am (thank God) constitutionally superior to reason.
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My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody.
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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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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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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 have heard, as everybody else has, of a spirit's haunting a house but I have had my own personal experience of a house's haunting a spirit.
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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.
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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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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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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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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 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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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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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 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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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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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 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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