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Is there any wilderness of sand in the deserts of Arabia, is there any prospect of desolation among the ruins of Palestine, which can rival the repelling effect on the eye, and the depressing influence on the mind, of an English country town in the first stage of its existence, and in the transition state of its prosperity?

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
Mind
Stage
Town
Palestine
Existence
Towns
Rivals
State
Prosperity
Depressing
Repelling
Eye
Effect
Transition
Deserts
States
English
Wilderness
Rival
Firsts
Effects
Ruins
Desolation
First
Among
Sand
Prospect
Country
Influence
Desert
Arabia

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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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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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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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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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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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Any woman who is sure of her own wits, is a match, at any time, for a man who is not sure of his own temper.
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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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It is the nature of truth to struggle to the light.
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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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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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...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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I am (thank God) constitutionally superior to reason.
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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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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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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 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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The horrid mystery hanging over us in this house gets into my head like liquor, and makes me wild.
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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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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 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.
Wilkie Collins