The Woman in White Quotes

“My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody.”
― 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

“No sensible man ever engages, unprepared, in a fencing match of words with a woman.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“The best men are not consistent in good—why should the worst men be consistent in evil?”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“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.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“Silence is safe.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“Let the music speak to us of tonight, in a happier language than our own.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“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

“Some of us rush through life and some of us saunter through life. Mrs. Vesey sat through life.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“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 Woman in White

“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

“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

“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 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

“I am a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man!”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“She looked so irresistibly beautiful as she said those brave words that no man alive could have steel his heart against her.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“Who cares for his causes of complaint? Are you to break your heart to set his mind at ease? No man under heaven deserves these sacrifices from us women. Men! They are the enemies of our innocence and our peace - they drag us away from our parents' love and our sisters' friendship - they take us body and soul to themselves, and fasten our helpless lives to theirs as they chain up a dog to his kennel. And what does the best of them give us in return?”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“When two members of a family or two intimate friends are separated, and one goes abroad and one remains at home, the return of the relative or friend who has been travelling always seems to place the relative or friend who has been staying at home at a painful disadvantage when the two first meet. The sudden encounter of the new thoughts and new habits eagerly gained in the one case, with the old thoughts and old habits passively preserved in the other, seems at first to part the sympathies of the most loving relatives and the fondest friends, and to set a sudden strangeness, unexpected by both and uncontrollable by both, between them on either side.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“There are three things that none of the young men of the present generation can do.They can't sit over their wine;they can't play at wist;and they can't pay a lady a compliment.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“Men little know when they say hard things to us how well we remember them, and how much harm they do us.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“Where is the woman who has ever really torn from her heart the image that has been once fixed in it by a true love? Books tell us that such unearthly creatures have existed - but what does our own experiences say in answer to books?”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“...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

“Don't let me think.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“Dont speak of tomorrow.Let the music speak to us tonight,in a happier language than ours.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“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

“It is the grand misfortune of my life that nobody will let me alone.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“Tears are scientifically described as a Secretion. I can understand that a secretion may be healthy or unhealthy, but I cannot see the interest of a secretion from a sentimental point of view.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“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, The Woman in White

“No man under heaven deserves these sacrifices from us women. Men! They are the enemies of our innocence and our peace – they drag us away from our parents’ love and our sisters’ friendship – they take us body and soul to themselves, and fasten our helpless lives to theirs as they chain up a dog to his kennel. And what does the best of them give us in return?”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White