The Woman in White Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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 in White

“I roused myself from the book which I was dreaming over rather than reading,”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“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, The Woman in White

“Through all the ways of our unintelligible world, the trivial and the terrible walk hand in hand together.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“Being, however, nothing but a woman, condemned to patience, propriety, and petticoats for life, I must respect the house-keeper's opinions, and try to compose myself in some feeble and feminine way.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“We don't want genius in this country unless it is accompanied by respectability.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“Habits of literary composition are perfectly familiar to me. One of the rarest of all the intellectual accomplishments that a man can possess is the grand faculty of arranging his ideas. Immense privilege! I possess it. Do you?”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“The small pulse of the life within me, and the great heart of the city around me, seemed to be sinking in unison.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“When a sensible woman has a reasonable question put to her, and evades it by a flippant answer, it is a sure sign, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, that she has something to conceal.”
― Wilkie collins, The Woman in White

“What are we (I ask) but puppets in a show-box? Oh, omnipotent Destiny, pull our strings gently! Dance us mercifully off our moserable little stage!”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“THIS is the story of what a Woman’s patience can endure, and what a Man’s resolution can achieve.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“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

“He has that quiet deference, that look of pleased, attentive interest, in listening to a woman, which, say what we may, we can none of us resist.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“Is there any wilderness of sand in the deserts of Arabia, is there any prospect of desolation among the ruins of Palestine, which can rival the repelling effect on the eye, and the depressing influence on the mind, of an English country town in the first stage of its existence, and in the transition state of its prosperity?”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“The dress of Virtue, in our parts, was cotton print. I had silk.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“The grandest mountain prospect that the eye can range over is appointed to annihilation. The smallest human interest that the pure heart can feel is appointed to immortality.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“The rod of iron with which he rules her never appears in company--it is a private rod, and is always kept upstairs.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“Is it necessary to say what my first impression was when I looked at my visitor's card? Surely not! My sister having married a foreigner, there was but one impression that any man in his senses could possibly feel. Of course the Count had come to borrow money of me.

"Louis," I said, "do you think he would go away if you gave him five shillings?”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“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

“In my youth, I should have chafed and fretted under the irritation of my own unreasonable state of mind. In my age, I knew better, and went out philosophically to walk it off.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“One of the rarest of all the intellectual accomplishments that a man can possess is the grand faculty of arranging his ideas.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“Let Lady Glyde's maid come in, Louis. Stop! Do her shoes creak?"
I was obliged to ask the question. Creaking shoes invariably upset me for the day. I was resigned to see the Young Person, but I was NOT resigned to let the Young Person's shoes upset me. There is a limit even to my endurance.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“Nature has so much to do in this world, and is engaged in generating such a vast variety of co-existent productions, that she must surely be now and then too flurried and confused to distinguish between the different processes that she is carrying on at the same time. Starting from this point of view, it will always remain my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“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, The Woman in White

“… you are so much better off as a single woman – unless – unless you are very fond of your husband …”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“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

“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