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The Woman in White QUOTES

The Woman in White QUOTES

1 " 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 , The Woman in White

2 " I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story. "

― Wilkie Collins , The Woman in White

3 " 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. "

― Wilkie Collins , The Woman in White

4 " No sensible man ever engages, unprepared, in a fencing match of words with a woman. "

― Wilkie Collins , The Woman in White

5 " 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 , The Woman in White

6 " 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 , The Woman in White

7 " 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 Woman in White

8 " 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 , The Woman in White

9 " 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 , The Woman in White

10 " 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 , The Woman in White

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

― Wilkie Collins , The Woman in White

12 " 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 Woman in White

13 " 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 , The Woman in White

14 " 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 in White

15 " 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 Woman in White

16 " 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 , The Woman in White

17 " 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 , The Woman in White

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

― Wilkie Collins , The Woman in White

19 " 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 , The Woman in White

20 " 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 , The Woman in White