Demelza Poldark Quotes

“Not for the first time he was conscious of emotional lights and shades in his wife that could not be categorized, could not be named as sensuous or emotional as such, perhaps derived from each and gave to each but in essence grew out of a deeper fund of temperament that he still could not altogether apprehend. The simple miner's daughter was not simple in character at all.”
― Winston Graham, The Four Swans

“Everyone," Ross said, "seems a little less concerned than I do. Am I more tender-hearted for others or only tender because of my own conscience?"
"We are not–untender," she said. "Not so. But maybe we are more–resigned. When a man is condemned to death we accept it, though it's sad to do so. We know we cannot change it. You hoped to change it–so it's more of a–a disappointment. You feel you have failed. We don't feel that because we never hoped to succeed.”
― Winston Graham, The Four Swans

“He tried to remember her as a thin little urchin trailing across the fields with Garrick behind her. But that was no use at all. The urchin was gone forever. It was not beauty she had grown overnight but the appeal of youth, which was beauty in its own right.”
― Winston Graham, Ross Poldark

“Oh dear, thought Demelza, how strange it all is! Me, sitting here, a mother, like a middle-aged dowager, moving in the best circles, behaving with prim propriety, hands folded on reticule, feet politely together, smiling graciously when spoken to, inclining the head this way and that, the perfect lady; when I've still got two scars on my back from my father's leather strap, and I learned to swear and curse and spit before I was seven, and I crawled with lice and ate what food I could find lying in the gutter, and had six dirty undernourished brothers all younger than me to look after.”
― Winston Graham, The Stranger from the Sea