Top 100 Winston Graham Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “I am not agitated. I am only agitated when someone advises me to reduce my diet.”

— Winston Graham

53. “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

54. “It is hopeless for older people to tell younger ones – particularly their own children – that they have been through the same thing. Such information is no use at all! It bounces off one’s own grief – or jealousy or distress. If we are all born the same we are also all born unique – we all go through torments nobody else has ever had.”

— Winston Graham

55. “Tedn’t law. Tedn’t right. Tedn’t just. Tedn’t sense. Tedn’t friendly.”

— Winston Graham

56. “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

57. “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

58. “He pushed her nails away from his eyes, accepting her bites as if they were no part of him. He pulled the cloth away from her throat, gripped it. Her screaming stopped. Her eyes started tears, died, grew big. She knew there was death, but life called her, sweet life, all the sweetness of youth, not yet gone. Dwight, the baronet, years of triumph, crying, dying.”

— Winston Graham

59. “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.”

— Winston Graham

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

— Winston Graham

61. “No, you never do start arguments, do you, with your cold looks an’ your bitter tongue! You just freeze everyone up an’ – an’ despise everything that isn’t up to your standard. It’s – it’s unfair and horrible! Perhaps that’s what you want me always to feel. Perhaps you’re sorry you ever bothered to marry me!”

— Winston Graham

62. “He said in exasperation, “Goddamn it, you should know I’m not used to dealing with women! You search the earth to find some special secret feminine grievance to gnaw over for months on end and then produce it coolly on the mat to explain all the irrational hedging and dodging of an entire winter –.”

— Winston Graham

63. “Demelza said: ‘It seems to me no man is wise enough if the woman is not wise enough.’ Ross.”

— Winston Graham

64. “I think you must have your feelings under a very good control. You turn them about and face them the way you want them to be. I wish I could do that. What’s the secret?”

— Winston Graham

65. “Ill usage makes the sweetest of us vicious.”

— Winston Graham

66. “His hands touched the cool skin of her back, Abruptly they slipped inside her frock and closed about her waist. She leaned her head back against his shoulder and he kissed her until the room went dark before her eyes.”

— Winston Graham

67. “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

68. “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.”

— Winston Graham

69. “No bal maidens or spallers.”

— Winston Graham

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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.”

— Winston Graham

73. “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

74. “The French have a saying – is it the French? I don’t know, I believe so – there is a saying that you do not put a boiling kettle upon the fire. You put cold water in the kettle and allow it to warm. So with marriage.”

— Winston Graham

75. “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

76. “I didn’t want either him or his cousin, I only wanted to be able to rob them in peace.”

— Winston Graham

77. “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

78. “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

79. “I believe yours is the only wisdom, Demelza.”

— Winston Graham

80. “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

81. “Men’s tongues in some things outrun women’s.”

— Winston Graham

82. “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

83. “Refreshment is the remedy for all manner of embarrassments.”

— Winston Graham

84. “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

85. “Blemishes on the beauty of a person one loves are like grace notes adding something to a piece of music.”

— Winston Graham

86. “I’m afraid they would droop. See, they’re drooping already. Bluebells are like that.”

— Winston Graham

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

— Winston Graham

88. “I’ve interrupted a party. Is it in celebration of the peace or in honor of the next war?”

— Winston Graham

89. “If every one of you was to clean before his own front door, all would be clean of cow flops.”

— Winston Graham

90. “Why must you plague me with these questions in the middle of the night?”

— Winston Graham

91. “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

92. “Of course there has to be an end,’ she said. ‘Of course. For that is what everyone has faced since the world began. And that is – what do you call it? – intolerable. It’s intolerable! So you must not think of it. You must not face it. Because it is a – certainty it has to be forgotten. One cannot – must not – fear a certainty.”

— Winston Graham

93. “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

94. “Children in their youth blossomed and bloomed; then chance, inclination, heredity all played their part.”

— Winston Graham

95. “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

96. “People might think it lonely living on my own nearly all the time, but I never found it lonely. I always had plenty to think about, and anyway maybe I’m not so good on people.”

— Winston Graham

97. “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

98. “Tenderness is not like money: the more you give to one, the more you have for others.”

— Winston Graham

99. “It isn’t where you’re born in this world, it’s what you do.”

— Winston Graham

100. “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