Top 100 Winston Graham Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

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

— Winston Graham

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

— Winston Graham

4. “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

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

— Winston Graham

6. “You must not face it. Because it is a – certainty it has to be forgotten. One cannot – must not – fear a certainty. All we know is this moment, and this moment, Ross, we are alive! We are. We are. 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 one 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

7. “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

8. “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

9. “He pronounced some of his words as if they were corks being drawn out of bottles.”

— Winston Graham

10. “Strange sometimes how easy bitter words came, how hard the kind ones.”

— Winston Graham

11. “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

12. “A nice frame doesn’t make a nice picture.”

— Winston Graham

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

— Winston Graham

14. “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

15. “There are no permanent things, only fleeting moments of warmth and companionship, precious stationary seconds in a flicker of troubled days. The.”

— Winston Graham

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

— Winston Graham

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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.”

— Winston Graham

20. “Love is not a possession to hoard. You give it away. It’s a blessing and a balm.”

— Winston Graham

21. “Autumn lingered on as if fond of its own perfection.”

— Winston Graham

22. “The acme of futility was to regret a pleasure that was past, and he had no intention of doing so.”

— Winston Graham

23. “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

24. “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

25. “I want the home about me: candles burning, curtains drawn, warmth, tea, friendship, love.”

— Winston Graham

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

— Winston Graham

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

— Winston Graham

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “If you wish to discover a man’s true feelings, it is always best to provoke him.”

— Winston Graham

32. “It was since he returned home that the evil eye of discontent had been on him, making empty air of his attempts to find a philosophy of his own, turning to ashes whatever he grasped.”

— Winston Graham

33. “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

34. “Out of sight would not be out of mind, but it would at least be out of danger.”

— Winston Graham

35. “Marnie, I won’t say, Make him happy, but I will say, Be happy yourself. I think you’re capable of much more than you think.”

— Winston Graham

36. “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

37. “He moved towards her, and knew the moment he touched her that something had won his battle for him. He took her face in his hands, held it like a cup to be drunk from, and then kissed her. With a serious unsmiling mouth he touched her eyelids, her cheeks, her hair, and sighed, as if for the moment her acceptance were all and there was no further desire in him.”

— Winston Graham

38. “Tedn for we to be setting the world in step. Tedn sense, tedn natural, tedn right, tedn safe.”

— Winston Graham

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

— Winston Graham

40. “Perhaps you’re right; we don’t ever regain what we lightly lose.”

— Winston Graham

41. “If we lived for ever, who would look forward eagerly to tomorrow? If there were no darkness, should we so 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 were contrast there might be satiety. He.”

— Winston Graham

42. “Perhaps,” said Demelza, trembling all over. “Perhaps I’d ought to have asked for an introduction seeing it’s so long since we met.” “I don’t doubt you have been well consoled in my absence,” said Ross. “You were not concerned to come and see whether I was or no.” “It seems that I was unwelcome when I did.”

— Winston Graham

43. “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

44. “The greatest thing is to have someone who loves you and – and to love in return.”

— Winston Graham

45. “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

46. “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

47. “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

48. “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

49. “Whatever she suffered, whatever loss came to her, she would throw it off, for it was not in her nature to go under. Although she was the woman and he a fierce and sometimes arrogant man, hers was the stronger nature because the more pliant.”

— Winston Graham

50. “I am not a good pleader’, he said; ’being too infernal conscious of my own dignity. The dignified fool, Demelza, gets nowhere beside the suave flattering rogue.”

— Winston Graham