01c. 1856 ADShall I confess it, Mr. Hartright? 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 / quote ↗
03c. 1856 ADYou 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 that book for years—generally in combination with a pipe of tobacco—and I have found it my friend in need in all the necessities of this mortal life. When my spirits are bad—ROBINSON CRUSOE. When I want advice—ROBINSON CRUSOE. In past times when my wife plagued me; in present times when I have had a drop too much—ROBINSON CRUSOE. I have worn out six stout ROBINSON CRUSOES with hard work in my service. On my lady's last birthday she gave me a seventh. I took a drop too much on the strength of it; and ROBINSON CRUSOE put me right again. Price four shillings and sixpence, bound in blue, with a picture into the bargain.Wilkie Collins / quote ↗
04c. 1856 ADOur words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service.Wilkie Collins / quote ↗
05c. 1856 ADSympathies 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.Wilkie Collins / quote ↗
06c. 1856 ADThe explanation has been written already in the three words that were many enough, and plain enough, for my confession. I loved her.Wilkie Collins / quote ↗
07c. 1856 ADI dread the beginning of her new life more than words can tell, but I see some hope for her if she travels - none if she remains at home.Wilkie Collins / quote ↗
08c. 1856 ADThe 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 / quote ↗
09c. 1856 ADIf 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 / quote ↗
10c. 1856 ADThe first and last weakness of his life, before him again. For a moment he felt himself blinded by his own memories; his own remembrances of the wits and wiles of Marian Halcombe that would steal into his thoughts; the sound of her laughter at his outrageous tales, the shadowed glance of distrust, the way her eyebrows would raise ever so slightly despite her resolution to seem disinterested in his foreign insights. She was the first woman he ventured to have complete equality in matching his tremendous cleverness.Wilkie Collins / quote ↗
11c. 1856 ADIf ever sorrow and suffering set their profaning marks on the youth and beauty of Miss Fairlie’s face, then, and then only, Anne Catherick and she would be the twin-sisters of chance resemblance, the living reflections of one another.Wilkie Collins / quote ↗
12c. 1856 ADBut, ah me! where is the faultless human creature who can persevere in a good resolution, without sometimes failing and falling back?Wilkie Collins / quote ↗
13c. 1856 ADWhat 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 / quote ↗
14c. 1856 ADDid you fall asleep?""No. I couldn't sleep that night.""You were restless?""I was thinking of you."The answer almost unmanned me. Something in the tone, even more than in the words, went straight to my heart. It was only after pausing a little first that I was able to go on.Wilkie Collins / quote ↗
15c. 1856 ADI have abstained from expressing any opinion, so far," says Mr. Superintendent, with his military voice still in good working order. "I have now only one remark to offer, on leaving this case in your hands. There IS such a thing, Sergeant, as making a mountain out of a mole-hill. Good-morning.""There is also such a thing as making nothing out of a mole-hill, in consequence of your head being too high to see it." Having returned his brother-officer's compliment in those terms, Sergeant Cuff wheeled about, and walked away to the window by himself.Wilkie Collins / quote ↗
16c. 1856 ADI should have looked into my own heart, and found this new growth springing up there, and plucked it out while it was young.Wilkie Collins / quote ↗
18c. 1856 ADBut 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 / quote ↗
19c. 1856 ADDarker and darker, he said; farther and farther yet. Death takes the good, the beautiful, and the young - and spares me. The Pestilence that wastes, the Arrow that strikes, the Sea that drowns, the Grave the closes over Love and Hope, are steps of my journey, and take me nearer and nearer to the End.Wilkie Collins / quote ↗
20c. 1856 ADIs 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 / quote ↗
21c. 1856 ADIf I ever meet with the man who fulfills my ideal, I shall make it a condition of the marriage settlement, that I am to have chocolate under the pillow.Wilkie Collins / quote ↗
22c. 1856 ADBut in these modern times it may be decidedly asserted as a fact, that vice, in accomplishing the vast majority of its seductions, uses no disguise at all; appears impudently in its naked deformity; and, instead of horrifying all beholders, in accordance with the prediction of the classical satirist, absolutely attracts a much more numerous congregation of worshippers than has ever yet been brought together by the divinest beauties that virtue can display for the allurement of mankind.Wilkie Collins / quote ↗
23c. 1856 ADI 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.Wilkie Collins / quote ↗
24c. 1856 ADI should have asked why any room in the house was better than home to me when she entered it, and barren as a desert when she went out again—why I always noticed and remembered the little changes in her dress that I had noticed and remembered in no other woman’s before—why I saw her, heard her, and touched her (when we shook hands at night and morning) as I had never seen, heard, and touched any other woman in my life?Wilkie Collins / quote ↗
