208 Quotes by Winston Graham

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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...