Winston Graham Quotes & Sayings

Demelza said: 'It seems to me no man is wise enough if the woman is not wise enough.' Ross — Winston Graham

No bal maidens or spallers — Winston Graham

Give me the comma of imperfect striving, thus to find zest in the immediate living. Ever the reaching but never the gaining, ever the climbing but never the attaining of the mountain top. — Winston Graham

The case is closed, Mr. Poldark. You will kindly step down." "Otherwise," said Dr. Halse, "we will have you committed for contempt of court." Ross bowed slightly. "I can only assure you, sir, that such a committal would be a reading of my inmost thoughts. — Winston Graham

There's no paradise in love! It's--you're thinking in the wrong way. Love--the sort you're asking me for--is of the earth, earthy. Beautiful, maybe--sometimes it be like a gold mine that one digs into. But of the earth--earthy. Tis all wrong to speak of paradise. Love may be the nearest human beings can get--but it is still outside the gates--for it is human--easily lost--animal in the way it work, though more, much more than animal. Oftentimes it--uplifts, transports...but--but it should not be mistaken. It is a--a terrible mistake to pretend it is something quite different. — Winston Graham

Youth was so mercilessly hard in its decisions; it had its own unyielding standards and had not yet learned enough to know that time would prove them arbitrary. — Winston Graham

An hour before dawn they went down to the cove, following the bubble of the stream and the descending combe, with a glowworm here and there green-lit like a jewel in the dark. — Winston Graham

It isn't where you're born in this world, it's what you do. — Winston Graham

On the Monday morning, with the rain still pouring down, Ross went in to see Drake, who was sitting up in bed and, apart from the bandaged shoulder and the plastered fingers, was now looking more substantial than Dwight. Perhaps this too was not surprising. At nineteen, if a man does not die from a wound, he quickly gets better. 'So,' said Ross. 'I thought I might have had to take your sister home some bad news.' Drake smiled. All the damned family, Ross thought, had this wonderful smile. They had certainly not inherited it from their father. 'No, sur. I — Winston Graham

Demelza thought: She's one day too late, just one day. How beautiful she is; how I hate her. Then she glanced at Ross again, and for the first time like the stab of a treacherous knife it occurred to her that Ross's desire for her last night was a flicker for empty passion. All day she had been too preoccupied with her own feelings to spare time for his. Now she could see so much in his eyes. — Winston Graham

Lazy in everything," said Ross, "but the search for excuses. Like two old pigs in their sty and as slow to move from their own patch of filth." Prudie — Winston Graham

In all prospering human affairs there is a streak of hazard, a blending of good fortune with good judgment which gives the lucky man a sense of having earned his deserts and gives the deserving, if he is modest, an awareness of his luck. That — Winston Graham

God, thought Ross, it does work, and unfairly; but I want her, not any other, not the most beautiful eighteen-year-old damsel born out of a sea-shell, not the most seductive houri of any sultan's harem; I want her with her familiar gestures and her shining smile and her scarred knees, and I know she wants me in just the same way, and if there's any happiness more complete than this I don't know it and am not sure I even want it. — Winston Graham

I'm afraid they would droop. See, they're drooping already. Bluebells are like that. — Winston Graham

If every one of you was to clean before his own front door, all would be clean of cow flops. — Winston Graham

All men were born in the same way: no privilege existed that was not of man's own contriving. — Winston Graham

But was any future, anyone's future, unfraught by hazards of some sort? The only security was death. So long as one wanted to go on living on had to accept the risks. Well, she accepted them... — Winston Graham

Ross took a deep breath of the air, which was heavy with the smell of sea. He fancied he could hear the waves breaking. — Winston Graham

And what of this young woman beside him, whom he had loved devotedly for four years and still did love? She had given him more than Elizabeth ever could: months of unflawed relationship, unquestioning trust (which he was now betraying in thought) . Oh nonsense! What man did not at some time or another glance elsewhere? And who could complain if it remained at a glance? (Chance was a fine thing). — Winston Graham

People who brag of their ancestors are like root vegetables. All their importance is underground. — Winston Graham

He pronounced some of his words as if they were corks being drawn out of bottles. — Winston Graham

All I knew was that I was writing something out of my very guts, and that I was content. — Winston Graham

I have been under considerable pressure to buy at least a laptop computer. I have always turned the suggestions down for the reason that I have never done creative work on a typewriter. There is to me a lack of empathy. — Winston Graham

...in the best society hardly anyone can be certain who their father is. — Winston Graham

There were no tears in her. The wound went too deep, or she was not so constituted to give way to it. Hers would be the perpetual ache of loss and loneliness, slowly dulled with time until it became a part of her character, a faint sourness tinged with withered pride. — Winston Graham

Autumn lingered on as if fond of its own perfection. — Winston Graham

They are all sentimentalists at heart, the Poldarks, Verity thought, and she realized suddenly for the first time that it was a dangerous trait, far more dangerous than any cynicism. — Winston Graham

feel that, however steady a man is, if he has an unstable wife to whom he is devoted, then there is a corrosion at work on his own foundations. — Winston Graham

Refreshment is the remedy for all manner of embarrassments. — Winston Graham

and Ross was limping by the end of it. He rode a horse longer than he walked these days. Then it was an asking and a questing, a seeking among dark and sprawling figures, the thumb jerked, the finger pointed. Ross's escort moved like a small Scottish ferret from group to group. At last a man sat up and said: 'Yes, I'm Poldark. Who wants me?' 'One of your own blood,' said Ross. 'Who else?' There was a startled oath, and a thin man scrambled to his feet. He had been lying, his back propped against a tree, his scabbard across his knees. He peered in the uncertain starlight. 'By the Lord God! It's Uncle Ross!' 'Geoffrey Charles! I never — Winston Graham

inclined his head and moved off slowly across the beach. Tbe captain — Winston Graham

once had been. The — Winston Graham

Tenderness is not like money: the more you give to one, the more you have for others. — Winston Graham

But fear and fascination are yokefellows, oxen out of step but pulling in the same direction... — Winston Graham

To hear the young talk today you would think no one had had any excitement in the past, any heartaches, any problems, any bitter frustrations or heady fulfilment. The young of today were more than a shade tedious; pompous, self-centred, so sure that their concerns were the first important ones that had ever happened. They had no perspective. no sense of proportion. Perhaps it was necessary to be old to acquire a true sense of proportion. It was small consolation but it was something. On — Winston Graham

find features, author interviews and news — Winston Graham

I was very happy, I think part of the point of this creativity is to do something that helps you in a cathartic sense. — Winston Graham

much in it,' said Paul, pushing the broadsheet across. 'You don't ask me — Winston Graham

their stay when it was to take place with full formality. — Winston Graham

stopped, gasping at the air. The nail turned — Winston Graham

I suspect that for a good deal of the time you live in a sort of glass case, not knowing real enthusiasm or genuine emotion; or feeling them perhaps at second hand, feeling them sometimes because you think you ought to, not because you really do. — Winston Graham

Making money at gambling was like seeing ghosts: you never met someone who'd seen a ghost, only someone who knew someone who'd seen a ghost. You only met people who knew people who'd made a fortune at White's. Or on the racecourse. — Winston Graham

Since I met you,' he said, 'I've had no eyes and no thought for any other girl. When I was away nothing mattered about my coming back but this. If there was one thing I was sure of, it wasn't what I'd been taught by anyone else to believe, not what I learned from other people was the truth, but the truth that I felt in myself- about you.'

'Don't say any more.' She had gone very white. But for once her frailness did not stop him. It had to come out now.

'It isn't very pretty to have been made a fool of by one's own feelings,' he said. 'To take childish promises and build a-a castle out of them. And yet- even now sometimes I can't believe that all the things we said to each other were so trivial or so immature. Are you sure you felt so little for me as you pretend? — Winston Graham

Resentment and bitterness and old grudges were dead things, which rotted the hands that grasped them. — Winston Graham

You see, Ross, in every right marriage, in every good marriage a woman has to be three things, don't she? She's got to be a wife and look after a man's comforts in the way a man should be looked after. Then she's got to bear his children and get all swelled up like a summer pumpkin and then often-times feed them after and smell of babies and have them crawling all about her...But then, third, she has also to try and be his mistress at the same time; someone he is still interested in; someone he wants, not just the person who happens to be there and convenient; someone a bit mysterious...someone whose knee or -- or shoulder he wouldn't instantly recognize if he saw it beside him in bed. It's -- it's impossible. — Winston Graham

If there are two feelings, then I don't think you can put them in separate compartments ever, because one is a part of the other and inseparable. — Winston Graham

I have never been clever enough - or egotistical enough to spend 300 pages dipping into the sludge of my own subconscious. — Winston Graham

Demelza was beginning to feel like a lion tamer who has been putting his pets through their paces and finds them getting out of hand. — Winston Graham

Strange sometimes how easy bitter words came, how hard the kind ones. — Winston Graham

I think, sir,' said Demelza, 'that your apricot tart is about to be laced viz cream and rum, and you would do well to discover wezzer you can attempt zat. — Winston Graham

No man wants his wife to be a woman that other men don't desire....But every man wants his wife to be a woman that other men don't get. — Winston Graham

I could say how well he dances, but that isn't true, for he dances like that big friendly bear I saw last Christmas. — Winston Graham

Blemishes on the beauty of a person one loves are like grace notes adding something to a piece of music. — Winston Graham

I have little use for religion as it is practiced, or for astrology, or for belief in witchcraft or omens of good or ill-luck. I think they all stem from some insufficiency in men's minds, perhaps from a lack of a willingness to feel themselves utterly alone. But now and then I feel that there is something beyond the material world, somethings we all feel intimations of but cannot explain. Underneath the religious vision there is the harsh fundamental reality of all our lives, because we know we must live and die as the animals we are. But sometimes I suspect that under that harsh reality there is a further vision, still deeper based, that comes nearer to true reality than the reality we know. — Winston Graham

He was a man of moods, yet he was her constant, something unchanging, infinitely reliable, the pivot of her life. There could never be anyone else. Without him she would not be more than half alive. — Winston Graham

When a person is as happy as she was that summer, it is hard for others to be unaffected, and after a time the atmosphere she created began to have its effect on all in the house. — Winston Graham

Of course he'll bring no money. Nor never will. He's not the type to--accumulate. But it's a good name to have. And he's becoming a personality in the county. One never knows quite why this happens, eh? Not so much what a man does. More a matter of character. — Winston Graham

Love is not a possession to hoard. You give it away. It's a blessing and a balm. — Winston Graham

George stared across the street. 'There is only one trouble with the Poldarks,' he said after a moment. 'They cannot take a beating.'
'And only one trouble with the Warleggans,' said Ross. 'They never know when they are not wanted.'
George's color deepened. 'But they can appreciate and remember an insult.'
'Well, I trust you will remember this one.' Ross turned his back and went down the steps into the tavern. — Winston Graham

In order to destroy this system which we so much detest we are creating conditions over here which run contrary to our dearest p-principles. — Winston Graham

Qualified help was weak and timid. Either you come out dead against the attachment or else help without reservation, without giving the impression of reluctance and disapproval. — Winston Graham

The waves were shadows, snakes under a quilt, creeping in almost unseen until they emerged in milky ripples at the water's edge. — Winston Graham

I said to myself, 'He has done this and he has paid for it. Isn't that enough? Is a man to be condemned forever? Why do I go to church and repeat the Lord's Prayer if I don't hold to it, if there is no forgiveness? Is our own behavior higher than the founder of Christianity, that we should set a higher standard for others? — Winston Graham

Music, she thought, perhaps could be a continuing process, like life, a shedding of one skin as fast as another grew. Instead every tune seemed to exist with its notes firmly rooted in an event or an emotion or a period of time. — Winston Graham

When you bring an idealised relationship down to the level of an ordinary one it isn't necessarily the ordinary one that suffers'. — Winston Graham

Someone - a Latin poet - had defined eternity as no more than this: to hold and possess the whole fullness of life in one moment, there and then, past and present and to come. — Winston Graham

If what I feel for you is dislike -- for coming between me and my work sometime every day in the last fifteen months --if that's dislike...If being unable to forget your voice, or the way you turn your neck, or the lights in your hair -- if that's dislike...If wanting to hear that you're married and dreading to hear that you're married...If resenting the condescension that pretends you're not out of my reach...Perhaps you can identify these symptoms for me. — Winston Graham

The book from which you take your teaching, Dr. Halse, says that man shall not live by bread alone. These days you're asking men to live without even bread. — Winston Graham

Tedn't law. Tedn't right. Tedn't just. Tedn't sense. Tedn't friendly. — Winston Graham

It isn't very pretty to have been made a fool of by one's own feelings,' he said. 'To take childish promises and build a--a castle out of them... — Winston Graham

His was not an easy face to read, and no one could have told that in the past half hour he had suffered the worst knock of his life. Except that he no longer whistled into the wind or talked to his irritable mare, there was nothing to show. — Winston Graham

At that, his smile faded and he kissed her. "Ross," she said. "Dear Ross." "I love you," he said, "and am your servant. Demelza, look at me. If I've done wrong in the past, give me leave to make amends." So he found that what he had half despised was not despicable, that what had been for him the satisfaction of an appetite, a pleasant but commonplace adventure in disappointment, owned wayward and elusive depths he had not known before, and carried the knowledge of beauty in its heart. — Winston Graham

If you wish to discover a man's true feelings, it is always best to provoke him. — Winston Graham

Children in their youth blossomed and bloomed; then chance, inclination, heredity all played their part — Winston Graham

Either you trust a man and give him authority to carry out his treatment or you do not. When it goes well you are happy that you did so. When it goes ill you think, if only . . . — Winston Graham

His parents should be here soon. I shall feel happier when they are able to take the responsibility. — Winston Graham

I wish your husband well and hope he'll come home again to domestic bliss. — Winston Graham

...I mistrust folk who are always bringing God or Christ into their conversations. If it is not an actual blasphemy it is at least a presumption. It smacks of self-conceit, doesn't it? — Winston Graham

These days I often have a struggle not to feel inferior to you, that is in your judgment of human beings.' 'I don't think I have any judgment, at least not to be proud of. But perhaps I am nearer the earth than you. Like Garrick, I can smell a friend. — Winston Graham

Yes, it was a "beautiful" sermon, tugging the emotions and conjuring up pictures of greatness and peace. But were they talking about the decent peppery ordinary old man he knew, or had the subject strayed to the story of some saint of the past? Or were there perhaps two men being buried under the same name? One perhaps had shown himself to Ross, while the other had been reserved for the view of men like William-Alfred. Ross tried to remember Charles before he was ill, Charles with his love of cockfighting and his hearty appetite, with his perpetual flatulence and passion for gin, with his occasional generosities and meannesses and faults and virtues, like most men. There was some mistake somewhere. Oh well, this was a special occasion...But Charles himself would surely have been amused. Or would he have shed a tear with the rest for the manner of man who had passed away? — Winston Graham

showed where the ancient pewter teapot had leaked. At the other end was a scattering of crumbs left by the — Winston Graham

For life is a trumpery thing at best, isn't it? A few moments, a few words, between dark and dark. But in true love you keep company with the Gods. — Winston Graham

Well then, try to keep an open mind be ready to learn about other things.
Such as this, I suppose
Such as trying not to have set ideas - other people's ideas - about love — Winston Graham

A nice frame doesn't make a nice picture. — Winston Graham

The past is over, gone. What is to come doesn't exist yet. That's tomorrow! It's only now that can ever be, at any moment. And at this moment, now, we are alive--and together. We can't ask more. There isn't any more to ask. — Winston Graham

It is a mistake to restrict oneself in one's pleasures,' Ross said. 'One should never risk being thought a Puritan. — Winston Graham

He wondered if the real world was that one in which men fought for policies and principles and died or lived gloriously - or more often miserably - for the sake of an abstract word like patriotism or independence, or if reality belonged to the humble people and the common land. — Winston Graham

Jud threw down the turfs he had brought in. "If you learned her to hold 'er tongue," he said pettishly to his wife, "'twould be a sight betterer than learning 'er that. If you learned 'er manners, how to speak respectable to folk and answer respectable an' be respectable to her elders an' betters, 'twould be a sight betterer than that. Then ye could pat yourself on the 'ead and say, 'Thur, I'm doing a tidy job, learning her to be respectable.' But what are 'ee doing? Tedn't 'ard to answer. Tedn't 'ard to see. You're learning her to be sassy. — Winston Graham

Her shadow kept her company along the corridor to her bedroom, preceding her like a welcoming innkeeper. — Winston Graham

The greatest thing is to have someone who loves you and - and to love in return. — Winston Graham

He found, quite to his surprise, that he was happy. Not merely happy in Demelza's happiness but in himself. He couldn't think why. The condition just existed within him. — Winston Graham

The awful catastrophe of their quarrel had evaporated in a commonplace. He — Winston Graham

Instead, the room, which had seen her grow to maturity, would see her dry up and fade. The gilt mirror in the corner would bear its dispassionate testimony. All the ornaments and furnishings would be her companions through the years to come. And she realized that she would come to hate them, if she didn't already hate them, as one hates the witnesses of one's humiliation and futility. — Winston Graham

Life is like--like one of those hobby-horses you ride at a fair--round and round you go enjoying every moment and then the--then the music stops... — Winston Graham

I am enceinte, gravid, pregnant, in pup, call it what you will. No doubt there are as many names for the production of a child as for the act which initiates it. — Winston Graham

Life seemed to be teaching him that the satisfaction of most appetites carried in them the seeds of frustration, that it was the common delusion of all men to imagine otherwise. — Winston Graham

...are not all women treated by all men like something inferior, like chattels you take up and put down at will? — Winston Graham

In the depths of horror and despair, one comes to a new steadiness. There is no farther to fall. — Winston Graham

Ross stared a moment at the piece of flotsam he had brought home and hoped to salvage. She was standing there in her ragged shirt and three-quarter-length breeches, her matted hair over her face and the dirty half-starved puppy at her feet. She stood with one toe turned in and both hands loosely behind her back, staring across at the library. He hardened his heart. Tomorrow would not do. — Winston Graham

we can't alter the world, we can only adapt ourselves to it. — Winston Graham