{"author":"Wilkie Collins","author_id":"Wilkie+Collins","total_quotes":62,"quotes":[{"text":"He was, out of all sight (as I remember him), the nicest boy that ever spun a top or broke a window.","author":"Wilkie Collins","tags":["childhood","humor"],"id":706,"author_id":"Wilkie+Collins"},{"text":"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.","author":"Wilkie Collins","tags":["mgg","the-moonstone","wilkie-collins","work"],"id":9347,"author_id":"Wilkie+Collins"},{"text":"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.","author":"Wilkie Collins","tags":["arrow","beautiful","beauty","dark","death","drown","end","fin","grave","hope","journey","love","mortality","pestilence","sea","spares","the-end","the-good","the-sea","tragedy","wastes","young","youth"],"id":17238,"author_id":"Wilkie+Collins"},{"text":"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.","author":"Wilkie Collins","tags":["honesty","masks","truth"],"id":23832,"author_id":"Wilkie+Collins"},{"text":"If I ever meet with the man who fulfills my ideal, I shall make it a condition of the marriage settlement, that I am to have chocolate under the pillow.","author":"Wilkie Collins","tags":["chocolate","food","marriage"],"id":25027,"author_id":"Wilkie+Collins"},{"text":"Nature's voice and Nature's beauty---God's soothing and purifying angels of the soul---speak to me most tenderly and most happily, at such times as these.","author":"Wilkie Collins","tags":["god","nature","soul"],"id":29094,"author_id":"Wilkie+Collins"},{"text":"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 draught.","author":"Wilkie Collins","tags":["books","knowledge","literature","reading","words"],"id":63493,"author_id":"Wilkie+Collins"},{"text":"Men, being accustomed to act on reflection themselves, are a great deal too apt to believe that women act on reflection, too. Women do nothing of the sort. They act on impulse; and, in nine cases out of ten, they are heartily sorry for it afterward.","author":"Wilkie Collins","tags":["differences-in-men-and-women","men-and-women","relationships"],"id":71030,"author_id":"Wilkie+Collins"},{"text":"I find novels compose my mind. Do you read novels too? - Reverend Finch's wife.","author":"Wilkie Collins","tags":["novels","reading-books"],"id":76439,"author_id":"Wilkie+Collins"},{"text":"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.","author":"Wilkie Collins","tags":["fiction","humor","leisure","novels","reading"],"id":83754,"author_id":"Wilkie+Collins"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":62,"pages":7,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}