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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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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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Women can resist a man's love, a man's fame, a man's personal appearance, and a man's money, but they cannot resist a man's tongue when he knows how to talk to them.
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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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The horrid mystery hanging over us in this house gets into my head like liquor, and makes me wild.
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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 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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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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...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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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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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.
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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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The books - the generous friends who met me without suspicion - the merciful masters who never used me ill!
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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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Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service.
Wilkie Collins
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I am (thank God) constitutionally superior to reason.
Wilkie Collins
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I have always maintained that the one important phenomenon presented by modern society is - the enormous prosperity of Fools.
Wilkie Collins
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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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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.
Wilkie Collins
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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 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.
Wilkie Collins