“Nothing in this world is hidden forever. The gold which has lain for centuries unsuspected in the ground, reveals itself one day on the surface. Sand turns traitor, and betrays the footstep that has passed over it; water gives back to the tell-tale surface the body that has been drowned. Fire itself leaves the confession, in ashes, of the substance consumed in it. Hate breaks its prison-secrecy in the thoughts, through the doorway of the eyes; and Love finds the Judas who betrays it by a kiss. Look where we will, the inevitable law of revelation is one of the laws of nature: the lasting preservation of a secret is a miracle which the world has never yet seen.”
― Wilkie Collins, quote from No Name
“Men, being accustomed to act on reflection themselves, are a great deal too apt to believe that women act on reflection, too. Women do nothing of the sort. They act on impulse; and, in nine cases out of ten, they are heartily sorry for it afterward.”
― Wilkie Collins, quote from No Name
“Lo que no está en mi corazón, no lo escribirá mi pluma.”
― Wilkie Collins, quote from No Name
“accustomed to lure him into speaking of himself. But she put them far less spontaneously, far less adroitly, than usual. Her one all-absorbing anxiety in entering that room was not an anxiety to be trifled with.”
― Wilkie Collins, quote from No Name
“IT wanted little more than a fortnight to Christmas; but the weather showed no signs yet of the frost and snow, conventionally associated with the coming season. The atmosphere was unnaturally warm, and the old year was dying feebly in sapping rain and enervating mist.”
― Wilkie Collins, quote from No Name
“She put the Trust into her sister's hand. Magdalen took it from her mechanically. "You!" she said, looking at her sister with the remembrance of all that she had vainly ventured, of all that she had vainly suffered, at St. Crux—"you have found it!”
― Wilkie Collins, quote from No Name
“Magdalen drew further and further back. A twig from a tree near caught her cloak; she turned petulantly, broke it off, and threw it on the ground. "What right have you to question me?" she broke out on a sudden. "Whether I like Frank, or whether I don't, what interest is it of yours?" As she said the words, she abruptly stepped forward to pass her sister and return to the house.”
― Wilkie Collins, quote from No Name
“Here is one more book that depicts the struggle of a human creature, under those opposing influences of Good and Evil, which we have all felt, which we have all known.”
― Wilkie Collins, quote from No Name
“the mysterious morning stillness of hall and staircase. Who were the sleepers hidden in the upper regions? Let the house reveal its own secrets; and, one by one,”
― Wilkie Collins, quote from No Name
“The sad truth is, I am a martyr to my own sense of order. All untidiness, all want of system and regularity, cause me the acutest irritation. My attention is distracted, my composure is upset;”
― Wilkie Collins, quote from No Name
“Perhaps I have dwelt too long already on the little story of our parting from home? I can only say, in excuse, that my heart is full of it; and what is not in my heart my pen won't write.”
― Wilkie Collins, quote from No Name
“May I ask a question, doctor? Is she pining in this close place, too? When her sister comes, will her sister take her away?”
― Wilkie Collins, quote from No Name
“Now, Betteredge, exert those sharp wits of yours, and observe the conclusion to which the Colonel's instructions point!" I instantly exerted my wits. They were of the slovenly English sort; and they consequently muddled it all”
― Wilkie Collins, quote from No Name
“Her heart beat as if it would suffocate her. She had kept her promise bravely. The whole story of her life, from the time of the home-wreck at Combe-Raven to the time when she had destroyed the Secret Trust in her sister's presence, had been all laid before him. Nothing that she had done, nothing even that she had thought, had been concealed from his knowledge.”
― Wilkie Collins, quote from No Name
“You're the most extraordinary man I ever met with. One would think you had done nothing all your life but take people in."
Captain Wragge received that unconscious tribute to his native genius with the complacency of a man who felt that he thoroughly deserved it.”
― Wilkie Collins, quote from No Name
“Let the end come as it may, here I am ready to profit by it: here I am, facing both ways, with perfect ease and security - a moral agriculturist, with his eye on two crops at once, and his swindler's sickle ready for any emergency.
For the next week to come, the newspaper will be more interesting to me than ever. I wonder which side I shall eventually belong to?”
― Wilkie Collins, quote from No Name
“So do extremes meet; and such is sometimes the all-embracing capacity of the approval of a fool!”
― Wilkie Collins, quote from No Name
“Here is one more book that depicts the struggle of a human creature, under those opposing influences of Good and Evil,”
― Wilkie Collins, quote from No Name
“There was genuine regret in his face as he showed her that trifling attention. He was a vagabond and a cheat; he had lived a mean, shuffling, degraded life, but he was human; and she had found her way to the lost sympathies in him which not even the self-profanation of a swindler's existence could wholly destroy. "Damn”
― Wilkie Collins, quote from No Name
“Noel Vanstone [...] composed himself to meet the coming ordeal, with reclining head and grasping hands - in the position familiarly associated to all civilized humanity with a seat in a dentist's chair.”
― Wilkie Collins, quote from No Name
“Very strange!" he said to himself, vacantly. "It's like a scene in a novel—it's like nothing in real life." He”
― Wilkie Collins, quote from No Name
“[...] Louisa's attention, which had been wandering more and more during the progress of Magdalen's inquiries, wandered away altogether.”
― Wilkie Collins, quote from No Name
“[...] we will leave this place, and go into other lodgings - you as the mistress; and I as the maid."
"I should be found out, ma'am," interposed Louisa, trembling at the prospect before her. "I am not a lady."
"And I am," said Magdalen bitterly. "Shall I tell you what a lady is? A lady is a woman who wears a silk gown, and has a sense of her own importance. I shall put the gown on your back, and the sense in your head.”
― Wilkie Collins, quote from No Name
“If they show themselves disposed to accept their proper position I will assist them to start virtuously in life by a present of one hundred pounds each. This sum I authorize you to pay them, on their personal application, with the necessary acknowledgment of receipt; and on the express understanding that the transaction, so completed, is to be the beginning and the end of my connection with them. The”
― Wilkie Collins, quote from No Name
“the window, turned back again into the room,”
― Wilkie Collins, quote from No Name
“The woman never lived yet who could cast a true-love out of her heart because the object of that love was unworthy of her. All”
― Wilkie Collins, quote from No Name
“But she made one serious mistake which very clever people in their intercourse with their intellectual inferiors are almost universally apt to commit—she trusted implicitly to the folly of a fool. She”
― Wilkie Collins, quote from No Name
Wilkie Collins
Born place: in London, England, The United Kingdom
Born date January 8, 1824
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“If I had my life to live over, I’d try and make more mistakes next time. I would relax. I would limber up. I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I know of very few things I would take seriously. I would be crazier. I would be less hygienic. I would take more chances. I would take more trips. I would climb more mountains, swim more rivers and watch more sunsets. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would have more actual troubles and fewer imaginary ones. You see, I am one of those people who live prophylactically and sanely and sensibly, hour after hour, day after day. Oh, I have had my moments and, if I had to do it over again, I’d have more of them. In fact, I’d try to have nothing else. Just moments, one after another, instead of living so many years ahead each day. I have been one of those people who never go anywhere without a thermometer, a hot water bottle, a gargle, a raincoat, and a parachute. If I had to do it over again, I would go places and do things and travel lighter than I have. If I had my life to live over, I would start bare-footed earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. I would play hooky more. I wouldn’t make such good grades except by accident. I would ride on more merry-go-rounds. I’d pick more daisies.”
― Sabrina Ward Harrison, quote from Spilling Open: The Art of Becoming Yourself
“Society prepares the crime; the criminal only commits it.”
― James Patterson, quote from Cat and Mouse
“The conspicuous fault of the Jeffersonian Party, like the personal fault of Senator Trowbridge, was that it represented integrity and reason, in a year when the electorate hungered for frisky emotions, for the peppery sensations associated, usually, not with monetary systems and taxation rates but with baptism by immersion in the creek, young love under the elms, straight whisky, angelic orchestras heard soaring down from the full moon, fear of death when an automobile teeters above a canyon, thirst in a desert and quenching it with spring water—all the primitive sensations which they thought they found in the screaming of Buzz Windrip. *”
― Sinclair Lewis, quote from It Can't Happen Here
“The school even had a Latin motto: Pergo et Perago, which sounded like the story of two Italian cannibals but which actually meant “I try and I achieve.”
― Anthony Horowitz, quote from Crocodile Tears
“Love it is that drives and sustains us!' I translate: we don't know what drives and sustains us, only that we are most miserably driven and, imperfectly, sustained. Love is how we call our ignorance of what whips us.”
― John Barth, quote from Lost in the Funhouse
61 Hours
The Scar
Introductions
This Savage Song
The Woman Warrior
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