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

— Wilkie Collins

Shall I confess it, Mr. Hart right? 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

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 realize.

— Wilkie Collins

The best men are not consistent in good—why should the worst men be consistent in evil?

— Wilkie Collins

The bleak autumn wind was still blowing, and the solemn, surging moan of it in the wood was dreary and awful to hear through the night silence. Issac felt strangely wakeful. He resolved, as he lay down in bed, to keep the candle alight until he began to grow sleepy; for there was something unendurably depressing in the bare idea of lying awake in the darkness, listening to the dismal, ceaseless moan of the wind in the wood. ("The Dream Woman")

— Wilkie Collins

The books - the generous friends who met me without suspicion - the merciful masters who never used me ill!

— Wilkie Collins

The books—the generous friends who met me without suspicion—the merciful masters who never used me ill! The only years of my life that I can look back on with something like pride... Early and late, through the long winter nights and the quiet summer days, I drank at the fountain of knowledge, and never wearied of the draft.

— Wilkie Collins

The clouds had gathered, within the last half-hour. The light was dull; the distance was dim. The lovely face of Nature met us, soft and still and colorless – met us without a smile.

— Wilkie Collins

The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.

— Wilkie Collins

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