Wilkie Collins
Wilkie Collins
William Wilkie Collinswas an English novelist, playwright, and short story writer. His best-known works are The Woman in White, No Name, Armadale, and The Moonstone. The last is considered the first modern English detective novel...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth8 January 1824
important fool prosperity
I have always maintained that the one important phenomenon presented by modern society is - the enormous prosperity of Fools.
thinking brain rooms
I am thinking,’ he remarked quietly, ’whether I shall add to the disorder in this room, by scattering your brains about the fireplace.
fall persevere sometimes
But, ah me! where is the faultless human creature who can persevere in a good resolution, without sometimes failing and falling back?
spiritual lying expression
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 deep for words, too deep almost for thoughts, are touched, at such times, by other charms than those which the senses feel and which the resources of expression can realise. 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.
wine men play
There are three things that none of the young men of the present generation can do.They can't sit over their wine;they can't play at wist;and they can't pay a lady a compliment.
patience men stories
This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve.
views healthy tears
Tears are scientifically described as a Secretion. I can understand that a secretion may be healthy or unhealthy, but I cannot see the interest of a secretion from a sentimental point of view.
mother vegetables mind
...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.
christian average comfort
I am an average good Christian, when you don't push my Christianity too far. And all the rest of you—which is a great comfort—are, in this respect, much the same as I am.
children ideas machines
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.
sleep life-is drink
My business in life is to eat, drink, sleep, and die. Everything else is superfluity and I will have none of it.
men ideas intellectual
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?
men nerves looks
I am a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man!
beautiful heart men
She looked so irresistibly beautiful as she said those brave words that no man alive could have steel his heart against her.