This post is just a quick little thing to address something which I was randomly thinking about. Since I posted a quote from C.S. Lewis yesterday, it reminded me that I have been reading a book by a phenomenal English author named Wilkie Collins. He and Dickens were good friends, and would discuss story topics with each other. Other than being the father of what we consider the modern mystery novel, he has an exceptional ability to put into words his great intuition and understanding of human nature and the relationships between men and women as well as revealing his excellant understanding of the woman's nature.

Here are a few notable quotables from his book-- they are wonderful as part of the whole, but are truly remarkable in their own right.

• "However, don't despair, Mr. Hartright. This is a matter of curiousity; and you have got a woman for your ally. Under such conditions success is certain, sooner or later."
• "Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service."
• "No sensible man ever engages, unprepared, in a fencing match with the words of a woman."
• "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."
• "Most men show something of their dispositions in their own house which they have concealed elsewhere."
• "Drop by drop, I poured the profaning bitterness of this world's wisdom into that pure heart and innocent mind, while every higher and better feeling within me recoiled from my miserable task."
• "Two women in possession of your private mind ---bad, bad, bad, my friend!"
• "Women can resist a man's love, a man's fame, a man's personal appearance, and a man's money, but they cannot resist a man's tongue, when he knows how to talk to them."

And my personal favorite...

• "The woman who first gives life, light and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has reamined unknown to us till she appeared. 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 realise. The mystery which underlies the beauty of women is never raised about the reach of all expression until it has claimed kindred with the deeper mystery in our own souls. Then, and then only, has it passed beyond the narrow region on which light falls, in this world, from the pencil and the pen."

just something to think about. <><