Quotes · verified word for word in the text
Wilkie Collins quotes
16 quotes from 3 of Wilkie Collins’s books on this site, book by book. Each quote is copied exactly from the book’s text in this site’s reader (the Project Gutenberg e-text named under each book) and links to its passage; when this page was built, every quote was checked word for word against that text. Quotes we could not find in a book we host are not listed.
The Woman in White
This is the story of what a Woman’s patience can endure, and what a Man’s resolution can achieve.
My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody.
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.
“I am nothing but a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man.”
— Spoken by a character · The Woman in White (part 4 of 5)
No sensible man ever engages, unprepared, in a fencing match of words with a woman.
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.
The best men are not consistent in good—why should the worst men be consistent in evil?
— Spoken by a character · The Woman in White (part 5 of 5)
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.
— Spoken by a character · The Woman in White (part 4 of 5)
The Moonstone
Starting from these plain facts, the idea is that we should all write the story of the Moonstone in turn—as far as our own personal experience extends, and no farther.
— Spoken by a character · Chapter I
We had our breakfasts—whatever happens in a house, robbery or murder, it doesn’t matter, you must have your breakfast.
In all my experience along the dirtiest ways of this dirty little world, I have never met with such a thing as a trifle yet.
— Spoken by a character · Chapter XII
We are all of us more or less unwilling to be brought into the world. And we are all of us right.
— Spoken by a character · Chapter IV
The Haunted Hotel: A Mystery of Modern Venice
In every class of society, gratitude is the rarest of all human virtues.
Ask yourself if there is any explanation of the mystery of your own life and death.