“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, quote from The Black Moon
“Blemishes on the beauty of a person one loves are like grace notes adding something to a piece of music.”
― Winston Graham, quote from The Black Moon
“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, quote from The Black Moon
“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, quote from The Black Moon
“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, quote from The Black Moon
“we can’t alter the world, we can only adapt ourselves to it.”
― Winston Graham, quote from The Black Moon
“On the Monday morning, with the rain still pouring down, Ross went in to see Drake, who was sitting up in bed and, apart from the bandaged shoulder and the plastered fingers, was now looking more substantial than Dwight. Perhaps this too was not surprising. At nineteen, if a man does not die from a wound, he quickly gets better. ‘So,’ said Ross. ‘I thought I might have had to take your sister home some bad news.’ Drake smiled. All the damned family, Ross thought, had this wonderful smile. They had certainly not inherited it from their father. ‘No, sur. I”
― Winston Graham, quote from The Black Moon
“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, quote from The Black Moon
“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, quote from The Black Moon
“find features, author interviews and news”
― Winston Graham, quote from The Black Moon
“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, quote from The Black Moon
“With age one never looked far ahead. The marathon horizons of youth narrowed and shortened into hurdles of age.”
― Winston Graham, quote from The Black Moon
“It is a mistake to restrict oneself in one’s pleasures,’ Ross said. ‘One should never risk being thought a Puritan.”
― Winston Graham, quote from The Black Moon
“Perhaps it is like a fever that blows in the air, like cholera, like the plague; it blows in the air and settles on men – or a town – or a nation – and everyone in it, or nearly everyone, falls a victim.’ He”
― Winston Graham, quote from The Black Moon
“These days I often have a struggle not to feel inferior to you, that is in your judgment of human beings.’ ‘I don’t think I have any judgment, at least not to be proud of. But perhaps I am nearer the earth than you. Like Garrick, I can smell a friend.”
― Winston Graham, quote from The Black Moon
“...I mistrust folk who are always bringing God or Christ into their conversations. If it is not an actual blasphemy it is at least a presumption. It smacks of self-conceit, doesn't it?”
― Winston Graham, quote from The Black Moon
“In order to destroy this system which we so much detest we are creating conditions over here which run contrary to our dearest p-principles.”
― Winston Graham, quote from The Black Moon
“Yet, although he could not quite work this out in simple terms in his own mind, the very savour of life, he thought, was itself enhanced if it were not totally taken for granted. Perhaps it was something to do with the whole philosophy of the world into which we were born. If we lived for ever, who would look forward eagerly to tomorrow? If there were no darkness, should we 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 was contrast there might be satiety.”
― Winston Graham, quote from The Black Moon
“was now working at near its”
― Winston Graham, quote from The Black Moon
Winston Graham
Born place: in Manchester, The United Kingdom
Born date June 30, 1908
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“As a teenager, I always intended to do my homework. But when the supplicant dead come to you for justice and you also have occasional prophetic dreams, life tends to interfere with your studies.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Odd Hours
“As ever, his grief made my heart ache. "Ambition is a dangerous thing," I murmured. "One can harbor it unknowing, only to find it sparked into life when the opportunity presents itself.”
― Jacqueline Carey, quote from Naamah's Blessing
“At the sight of him, I was clutched by a feeling like that precarious moment just past the top of a roller coaster's highest hill when gravity takes hold and the car barrels downward.”
― April Lindner, quote from Jane
“But so long as we are occupied with any other object than God Himself there will be neither rest for the heart nor peace for the mind. But when we receive all that enters our lives as from His hand, then, no matter what may be our circumstances or surroundings—whether in a hovel, a prison, a dungeon, or a martyr’s stake—we shall be enabled to say, “The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places” (Psa 16:6). But that is the language of faith, not of sight or of sense.”
― Arthur W. Pink, quote from The Sovereignty of God
“So why bother investing in one’s memory in an age of externalized memories? The best answer I can give is the one I received unwittingly from EP, whose memory had been so completely lost that he could not place himself in time or space, or relative to other people. That is: How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember. We’re all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memories. No lasting joke, invention, insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least. Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: All these essentially human acts depend on memory. Now more than ever, as the role of memory in our culture erodes at a faster pace than ever before, we need to cultivate our ability to remember. Our memories make us who we are. They are the seat of our values and source of our character.”
― Joshua Foer, quote from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
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