Wilkie Collins quotes

Wilkie Collins was an English novelist and playwright, renowned for his pioneering contributions to the detective and sensation genres. His most famous works, such as "The Woman in White" and "The Moonstone," blended suspenseful plots with social commentary. He influenced the development of modern detective fiction and remains a key figure in Victorian literature. Here are 43 of his quotes:

We had our breakfasts--whatever happens in a house, robbery or murder, it doesn't matter, you must have your breakfast.

Wilkie Collins

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.

Wilkie Collins

Men ruin themselves headlong for unworthy women.

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

My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody.

Wilkie Collins

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.

Wilkie Collins

Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service.

Wilkie Collins

I am nothing but a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man.

Wilkie Collins

Your tears come easy, when you're young, and beginning the world. Your tears come easy, when you're old, and leaving it.

Wilkie Collins

Dont speak of tomorrow. Let the music speak to us tonight, in a happier language than ours.

Wilkie Collins

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.

Wilkie Collins

Some of us rush through life and some of us saunter through life. Mrs. Vesey sat through life.

Wilkie Collins

Well may your heart believe the truths I tell; 'Tis virtue makes the bliss, where'er we dwell.

Wilkie Collins

I have always maintained that the one important phenomenon presented by modern society is - the enormous prosperity of Fools.

Wilkie Collins

It is the nature of truth to struggle to the light.

Wilkie Collins

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?

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 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

Rosanna Spearman had been a thief, and not being of the sort that get up Companies in the City, and rob from thousands, instead of only robbing from one, the law laid hold of her, and the prison and the reformatory followed the lead of the law.

Wilkie Collins

I confess I have often fancied myself transformed into some other person, and have felt a certian pleasure in seeing myself in my new chracter. One of our first amusements as children (if we have any imagination at all) is to get out of our own characters, and to try the characters of other personages as a change-to be fairies, to be queens, to be anything, in short, but what we really are.

Wilkie Collins

No man under Heaven deserves these sacrifices from us women. Men! They are the enemies of our innocence and our peace - they drag us away from our parents' love and our sisters' friendship - they take us body and soul to themselves, and fasten our helpless lives to theirs as they chain up a dog to his kennel.

Wilkie Collins

The actions of human beings are not invariably governed by the laws of pure reason.

Wilkie Collins