Best 46 quotes of Winston Graham on MyQuotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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).

A nice frame doesn’t make a nice picture.

At times I have discovered a new lowness of spirit, a new need to revolt, to kick against the constraints that a civilized life tries to impose.” He stopped and regarded her. “Because what is civilized life but an imposition of unreal standards upon flawed and defective human beings by other human beings no less flawed and defective?

A vida é a mesma coisa que se ficar num hospício de loucos", pensei. "Cada um vai circulando, imerso e afogado em suas próprias desilusões, sem que ninguém veja. A pessoa vai abrindo caminhos pelas celas, passando por entre os companheiros atormentados, rumo àquele que parece o único mentalmente são". Era exatamente o que eu estava fazendo agora.

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

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...

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.

Do you believe we are masters of ourselves, or merely dance like puppets on strings having the illusion of independence?

Everything at the moment, my dear, no doubt seems disgusting. I know the mood too well. But being in that mood, Ross, is like being out in the frost. If we do not keep on the move we shall perish.

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.

...Here, beast, you shall be the chairman, and mind you call us to order." He leaned forward and dropped the cat on the empty seat.

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

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.

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.

I am a miner's daughter," Demelza said. "I was not brought up gentle. Gentleness –is that the right word?– came upon me when I was half grown. I have Ross to thank for that. And you. But it don't alter me underneath. I still have two marks on my back where Father used the belt. There's naught a few drunks could do but what I couldn't give them back. Tis all a matter of being in the mood.

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

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.

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, something 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.

Ill usage makes the sweetest of us vicious.

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

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.

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

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

Men's tongues in some things outrun women's.

Monthly, out of common courtesy, he went to inquire after the invalid Charles, who refused either to die or get better.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Ross said: “I’ll tell you what is best for the other man, always, and that’s work. Work is a challenge. I’ve told you – I tried to drink myself out of my misery once. It didn’t succeed. Only work did. It’s the solvent to so much. Build yourself a wall, even if there’s hell in your heart, and when it’s done – even at the end of the first day – you feel better.

That reminds me of when you used to call and see us before Christmas, the year before last. Somehow–somehow life was all dark and secret and beautiful then.

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

The most frightening blazing anger was alive in her now. It was not only Elizabeth that she could have killed but Ross. She could have thrown every piece of crockery at him, and knives and forks too. Indeed she could have attacked him knife in hand. Fundamentally there was nothing meek or mild about her. She was a fighter, and it showed now.

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.

Wishing is like water caught in a dam. You let a little trickle of it escape and you don't think it's much, but in no time the trickle has worn a channel and the edges fall in and the water's doubled and then you get a flood carrying everything away.

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?

Yet, although he could not quite work this out in simple terms in his own mind, the very savour of life, he thought, was itself enhanced if it were not totally taken for granted. Perhaps it was something to do with the whole philosophy of the world into which we were born. If we lived for ever, who would look forward eagerly to tomorrow? If there were no darkness, should we appreciate the sun? Warmth after cold, food after hunger, drink after thirst, sexual love after the absence of sexual love, the fatherly greeting after being away, the comfort and dryness of home after a ride in the rain, the warmth and peace and security of one’s fireside after being among enemies. Unless there was contrast there might be satiety.