Winston Graham > Quotes

“The greatest thing is to have someone who loves you and—and to love in return.”
― Winston Graham, Ross Poldark

“Autumn lingered on as if fond of its own perfection.”
― Winston Graham, Ross Poldark

“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, Warleggan

“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, Ross Poldark

“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, Ross Poldark

“And Ross again knew himself to be happy-in a new and less ephemeral way than before. He was filled with a queer sense of enlightnment. It seemed to him that all his life had moved to this pinpoint of time down the scattered threads of twenty years; from his old childhood running thoughtless and barefoot in the sun on Hendrawna sands, from Demelza's birth in the squarlor of a mining cottage, from the plains of Virginia and the trampled fairgrounds of Redruth, from the complex impulses which had governed Elizabeth's choice of Francis and from the simple philosophies of Demelza's own faith, all had been animated to a common end-and that end a moment of enlightenment and understanding and completion. Someone--a Latin poet--had defined eternity as no more than this: to hold and possess the whole fullness of life in one moment, here and now, past and present and to come. He thought: if we could only stop here. Not when we get home, not leaving Trenwith, but here, here reaching the top of the hill out of Sawle, dusk wiping out the edges of the land and Demelza walking and humming at my side.”
― Winston Graham, Ross Poldark

“Strange sometimes how easy bitter words came, how hard the kind ones.”
― Winston Graham, Demelza

“Blemishes on the beauty of a person one loves are like grace notes adding something to a piece of music.”
― Winston Graham, The Black Moon

“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, Ross Poldark

“Do you believe we are masters of ourselves, or merely dance like puppets on strings having the illusion of independence?”
― Winston Graham, Jeremy Poldark

“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, Ross Poldark

“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, The Black Moon

“A nice frame doesn’t make a nice picture.”
― Winston Graham, Demelza

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

“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, The Black Moon

“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, Demelza

“Tedn't law. Tedn't right. Tedn't just. Tedn't sense. Tedn't friendly.”
― Winston Graham, Ross Poldark

“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, Ross Poldark

“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, Ross Poldark

“Tenderness is not like money: the more you give to one, the more you have for others.”
― Winston Graham, The Four Swans

“That’s all that matters. The greatest thing is to have someone who loves you and—and to love in return. People who haven’t got it—or had it—don’t believe that, but it’s the truth.”
― Winston Graham, Ross Poldark

“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, The Four Swans

“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, Jeremy Poldark

“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, Ross Poldark

“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, Ross Poldark

“Men's tongues in some things outrun women's.”
― Winston Graham, Warleggan

“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, The Angry Tide

“He felt he would like one more look at the sea, which even now was licking at the rocks behind the house. He had no sentimental notions about the sea; he had no regard for its dangers or its beauties; to him it was a close acquaintance whose every virtue and failing, every smile and tantrum he had come to understand.”
― Winston Graham, Ross Poldark

“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, Ross Poldark

“In the depths of horror and despair, one comes to a new steadiness. There is no farther to fall.”
― Winston Graham, Ross Poldark