208 Quotes by Winston Graham

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ross took a deep breath of the air, which was heavy with the smell of sea. He fancied he could hear the waves breaking.

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.

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.

No bal maidens or spallers.