Demelza Quotes

Tenderness is not like money: the more you give to one, the more you have for others. ~ Winston Graham

My heart swelled in my chest, like a froth of bubbles begging to be released. ~ Demelza Carlton

...are not all women treated by all men like something inferior, like chattels you take up and put down at will? ~ Winston Graham

I think, sir,' said Demelza, 'that your apricot tart is about to be laced viz cream and rum, and you would do well to discover wezzer you can attempt zat. ~ Winston Graham

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

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

I believe yours is the only wisdom, Demelza. ~ Winston Graham

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

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. ~ Winston Graham

Everyone," Ross said, "seems a little less concerned than I do. Am I more tender-hearted for others or only tender because of my own conscience?"
"We are not–untender," she said. "Not so. But maybe we are more–resigned. When a man is condemned to death we accept it, though it's sad to do so. We know we cannot change it. You hoped to change it–so it's more of a–a disappointment. You feel you have failed. We don't feel that because we never hoped to succeed. ~ Winston Graham

At that, his smile faded and he kissed her. "Ross," she said. "Dear Ross." "I love you," he said, "and am your servant. Demelza, look at me. If I've done wrong in the past, give me leave to make amends." 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

Demelza said: 'It seems to me no man is wise enough if the woman is not wise enough.' Ross ~ Winston Graham

And Ross again knew himself to be happy-in a new and less ephemeral way than before. He was filled with a queer sense of enlightnment. It seemed to him that all his life had moved to this pinpoint of time down the scattered threads of twenty years; from his old childhood running thoughtless and barefoot in the sun on Hendrawna sands, from Demelza's birth in the squarlor of a mining cottage, from the plains of Virginia and the trampled fairgrounds of Redruth, from the complex impulses which had governed Elizabeth's choice of Francis and from the simple philosophies of Demelza's own faith, all had been animated to a common end-and that end a moment of enlightenment and understanding and completion. Someone--a Latin poet--had defined eternity as no more than this: to hold and possess the whole fullness of life in one moment, here and now, past and present and to come. He thought: if we could only stop here. Not when we get home, not leaving Trenwith, but here, here reaching the top of the hill out of Sawle, dusk wiping out the edges of the land and Demelza walking and humming at my side. ~ Winston Graham

You see, Ross, in every right marriage, in every good marriage a woman has to be three things, don't she? She's got to be a wife and look after a man's comforts in the way a man should be looked after. Then she's got to bear his children and get all swelled up like a summer pumpkin and then often-times feed them after and smell of babies and have them crawling all about her...But then, third, she has also to try and be his mistress at the same time; someone he is still interested in; someone he wants, not just the person who happens to be there and convenient; someone a bit mysterious...someone whose knee or -- or shoulder he wouldn't instantly recognize if he saw it beside him in bed. It's -- it's impossible. ~ Winston Graham