Among the hundred thousand mysterious influences which a man exercises over a woman who loves him, I doubt if there is any more irresistible to her than the influence of his voice. I am not one of those women who shed tears on the smallest provocation: it is not in my temperament, I suppose. But when I heard that little natural change in his tone my mind went back (I can't say why) to the happy day when I first owned that I loved him. I burst out crying.

— Wilkie Collins

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

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

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

— Wilkie Collins

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

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

But in these modern times it may be decidedly asserted as a fact, that vice, in accomplishing the vast majority of its seductions, uses no disguise at all; appears impudently in its naked deformity; and, instead of horrifying all beholders, in accordance with the prediction of the classical satirist, absolutely attracts a much more numerous congregation of worshipers than has ever yet been brought together by the divinest beauties that virtue can display for the allurement of mankind.

— Wilkie Collins

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

Destiny has got the rope round my neck – and I feel it.

— Wilkie Collins

Did you fall asleep?"" No. I couldn't sleep that night."" You were restless?"" I was thinking of you." The answer almost unmanned me. Something in the tone, even more than in the words, went straight to my heart. It was only after pausing a little first that I was able to go on.

— Wilkie Collins