Wilkie Collins Quotes

“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

“The human heart is unsearchable. Who is to fathom it?”
― Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone

“If he was right, here was our quiet English house suddenly invaded by a devilish Indian Diamond - bringing after it a conspiracy of living rogues, set loose on us by the vengeance of a dead man".”
― Wilkie Collins

“Some people call that picturesque' said Sir Percival, pointing over the wide prospect with his half-finished walking-stick. 'I call it a blot on a gentleman's property. In my great-grandfather's time, the lake flowed to this place. Look at it now! It is not four feet deep anywhere, and it is all puddles and pools. I wish I could afford to drain it, and plant it all over. My bailiff (a superstitious idiot) says he is quite sure the lake has a curse on it, like the Dead Sea. What do you think, Fosco? It looks just the place for a murder, doesn't it?'
'My good Percival!' remonstrated the Count. 'What is your solid English sense thinking of? The water is too shallow to hide the body; and there is sand everywhere to print off the murderer's footsteps. It is, upon the whole, the very worst place for a murder that I ever set my eyes on.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“But compare the hardest day's work you ever did with the idleness that splits flowers and pokes its way into spiders' stomachs, and thank your stars that your head has got something it must think of, and your hands something that they must do.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone

“I hope I take up the cause of all oppressed people rather warmly.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone

“The girl ginned again, more cheerfully than ever. 'Bless you, miss! Baxter's the keeper; and when he finds strange dogs hunting about, he takes and shoots 'em. It's keeper's dooty, miss. I think that dog will die. Here's where he's been shot, ain't it? That's Baxter's doings, that is. Baxter's doings, miss, and Baxter's dooty.'
It was almost wicked enough to wish that Baxter had shot the housemaid instead of the dog.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“The secret which that confession discloses should be told with little effort, for it has indirectly escaped me already. The poor weak words, which have failed to describe Miss Fairlie, have succeeded in betraying the sensations she awakened in me. It is so with us all. Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service.
I loved her.”
― Wilkie Collins

“The Moonstone is the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels. But it is something more important than that; it is the best of all the novels written by that man who among the novelists of the nineteenth century was in every way the most closely associated with Charles Dickens. You cannot appreciate Collins without taking Dickens into account; and the work of Dickens after 1850 would not be what it is but for the reciprocal influence of Collins.”
― Eliot, T.S.