“ He was, out of all sight (as I remember him), the nicest boy that ever spun a top or broke a window. Wilkie Collins
“ Is the prison that Mr. Scoundrel lives in at the end of his career a more uncomfortable place than the workhouse that Mr. Honesty lives in at the end of his career? Wilkie Collins
“ But I am a just man, even to my enemy—and I will acknowledge, beforehand, that they are cleverer brains than I thought them. Wilkie Collins
“ 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! Wilkie Collins
“ If you will look about you (which most people won't do)," says Sergeant Cuff, "you will see that the nature of a man's tastes is, most times, as opposite as possible to the nature of a man's business. Wilkie Collins
“ 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. Wilkie Collins
“ The explanation has been written already in the three words that were many enough, and plain enough, for my confession. I loved her. Wilkie Collins
“ Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service. Wilkie Collins
“ You are not to take it, if you please, as the saying of an ignorant man, when I express my opinion that such a book as ROBINSON CRUSOE never was written, and never will be written again. I have tried… Wilkie Collins
“ 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. Wilkie Collins
“ 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. Wilkie Collins
“ The clouds had gathered, within the last half-hour. The light was dull; the distance was dim. The lovely face of Nature met us, soft and still and colourless – met us without a smile. Wilkie Collins
“ But compare the hardest day's work you ever did with the idleness that splits flowers and pokes its way into spiders' stomachs, and thank your stars that your head has got something it must think of,… Wilkie Collins
“ 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
“ 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. Sympathies that lie too de… Wilkie Collins
“ You musn't talk of a young lady *belonging* to anybody, as if she was a piece of furniture, or money in the Three per Cent, or something of that sort. Wilkie Collins
“ The books - the generous friends who met me without suspicion - the merciful masters who never used me ill! Wilkie Collins
“ Men, being accustomed to act on reflection themselves, are a great deal too apt to believe that women act on reflection, too. Women do nothing of the sort. They act on impulse; and, in nine cases out… Wilkie Collins
