Quotes From "The Woman In White" By Wilkie Collins

I say what other people only think, and when all the rest of the world is in a conspiracy to accept the mask for the true face, mine is the rash hand that tears off the plump pasteboard, and shows the bare bones beneath. Wilkie Collins

It is not for you to say - you Englishmen, who have conquered your freedom so long ago, that you have conveniently forgotten what blood you shed, and what extremities you proceeded to in the conquering - it is not for you to say how far the worst of all exasperations may, or may not, carry the maddened men of an enslaved nation. The iron that has entered into our souls has gone too deep for you to find it. Leave the refugee alone! Laugh at him, distrust him, open your eyes in wonder at the secret self which smolders in him, sometimes under the every-day respectability and tranquility of a man like me - sometimes under the grinding poverty, the fierce squalor, of men less lucky, less pliable, less patient than I am - but judge us not. In the time of your first Charles you might have done us justice - the long luxury of your freedom has made you incapable of doing us justice now. . 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. 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. Wilkie Collins

At any time, and under any circumstances of human interest, is it not strange to see how little real hold the objects of the natural world amid which we live can gain on our hearts and minds? We go to Nature for comfort in trouble, and sympathy in joy, only in books. Admiration of those beauties of the inanimate world, which modern poetry so largely and so eloquently describes, is not, even in the best of us, one of the original instincts of our nature. Wilkie Collins

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. Wilkie Collins

Miss Fairlie laughed with a ready good-humour, which broke out as brightly as if it had been part of the sunshine above us… 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

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

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. Wilkie Collins

The explanation has been written already in the three words that were many enough, and plain enough, for my confession. I loved her. Wilkie Collins

I 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

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

The 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

If 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

But, ah me! where is the faultless human creature who can persevere in a good resolution, without sometimes failing and falling back? Wilkie Collins

But 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

Darker 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

Is 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

I 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

I 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

Not a word had dropped from my lips, or from hers, that could unsettle either of us–and yet the same unacknowledged sense of embarrassment made us shrink alike from meeting one another alone Wilkie Collins

I am thinking, ’ he remarked quietly, ’whether I shall add to the disorder in this room, by scattering your brains about the fireplace. Wilkie Collins

The best men are not consistent in good–why should the worst men be consistent in evil? Wilkie Collins

There is nothing serious in mortality! Solomon in all his glory was Solomon with the elements of the contemptible lurking in every fold of his robes and in every corner of his palace. Wilkie Collins

It was cold and barren. It was no longer the view that I remembered. The sunshine of her presence was far from me. The charm of her voice no longer murmured in my ear. Wilkie Collins

You don’t have to speak at all– I know what you’d say…- Laura Wilkie Collins