Wilkie collins was a very popular English novelist, playwright and short story author of his time, a success he also shared with his friend Charles Dickens. And today we are celebrating the anniversary because the January 8, 1824 in London. Very prolific, he wrote 27 novels, more than 60 short stories, some 14 plays, and more than 100 nonfiction works. He is considered one of the creators of the detective novel genre and signed works such as moonstone, perhaps the most famous The Lady in white, Husband and wife, Basil o Armadale, among many. To remind you, here is a selection of phrases chosen.
Wilkie Collins — Phrase Selection
The Lady in white (1860)
- There are three things that none of the youth of this generation are capable of doing. They can't taste wine, they can't play whist, and they can't compliment a lady either.
- Tears streamed down her face. Her trembling hand sought the support of the table to support herself, while he held out the other to me. I took it between mine, squeezing it firmly. She fell my head on that cold hand. My tears wet her and my lips pressed against her. It was not a kiss of love. It was a contraction of desperate agony.
- No sensible man would dare to have a subtle exchange with a woman without being prepared for it.
- Our words seem gigantic when they can harm us and pygmy when they try to do us a good service.
- I'm nothing more than a nervous wreck dressed and groomed to look like a man.
Husband and wife (1870)
- "Don't you despise a woman like me?" Hearing that question, Arnold remembered with love the only woman who would be eternally sacred to him, the woman from whose breast he had received life. Is there a man who can think of his mother and despise women?
- The two women - one so magnificently dressed, the other so simply; one in the splendor of her beauty, the other withered and her health ruined; one with society at her feet, the other turned into an outlaw living in the inhospitable shadow of reproach, the two women looked at each other face to face and exchanged the cold and silent curtsies with which strangers greet each other.
poor miss finch (1872)
- When trust between two people who love each other disappears, everything else disappears at the same time. From that moment on, they find themselves in the same situation as if they were two strangers and they have to observe rules of etiquette.
- If I die, none of you will ever know. My death will not cast its shadow of sadness on the lives of the two of them, nor on yours. Forget me and forgive me. Do not lose, as I do, the first of the noblest of all mortal hopes, hope in life itself and in the future.
The moonstone (1868)
- I will say goodbye to this world that has deprived me of the happiness that it gives to others. I'll say goodbye to a life that just a little bit of kindness from you could ever make it nice again for me. Do not condemn me, sir, for this ending.
- "Give me fire, Betteredge." Is it conceivable that there is a man who, after having smoked for as many years as I have, is incapable of discovering a whole system for the treatment that should be given to women, at the bottom of his cigarette case? Follow me carefully and I will prove the thing to you in two words. You choose, for example, a cigar; you try it and you don't like it. What do you do then? You throw it away and try another. Now, now look at the system application. You choose a woman, try her, and she breaks your heart. Silly! , learn from your cigarette. Throw her away and try another one!
- Worldly people can afford all the luxuries... Among others, giving free rein to their own feelings. The poor do not enjoy such a privilege.
Basil (1852)
- There are few men who do not secretly pass through moments of intense feeling, moments in which, amid the unfortunate trivialities and hypocrisies of modern society, the image of a pure, innocent, generous, sincere woman is presented to them in their minds; a woman whose emotions are still warm, capable of making an impression, and whose affections and whose sympathy can still shine through in her actions and thus give color to her thoughts; a woman in whom we can place as full faith and trust as if we were still children, whom we despair of finding near the hardening influences of this world, whom we seldom venture to seek except in those places lonely and far away, in the countryside, in small and remote rural altars, on the margins of society, between forests and crops, on deserted and distant hills. That was the case with my sister.