Wilkie Collins

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

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

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.

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

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.

Every human institution (Justice included) will stretch a little, if you only pull it the right way.

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

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 …

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

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 …

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 …

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

"Ask yourself if there is any explanation of the mystery of your own life and death."

"A very remarkable work... in the present state of light literature in England, a novel that actually tells a story. It 's quite incredible, I know. Try the book. It has another extraordinary merit, it isn't written by a woman."

Men ruin themselves headlong for unworthy women.

People who read stories are said to have excitable brains.

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 …