The Stranger from the Sea Quotes

“People who brag of their ancestors are like root vegetables. All their importance is underground.”
― Winston Graham, The Stranger from the Sea

“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, The Stranger from the Sea

“Children in their youth blossomed and bloomed; then chance, inclination, heredity all played their part”
― Winston Graham, The Stranger from the Sea

“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, The Stranger from the Sea

“Although a marriage undertaken on one side to acquire a beautiful and patrician property, and on the other to obtain money and protection and a comfortable life, should certainly not have succeeded beyond the terms for which it was tacitly undertaken, it had been, had become successful.”
― Winston Graham, The Stranger from the Sea

“the most important thing was to strike a balance: poverty and riches each in their own way caused unhappiness. With money, the way to be happy was to continue to have almost enough.”
― Winston Graham, The Stranger from the Sea

“It was more than half a mile and Ross was limping by the end of it. He rode a horse longer than he walked these days. Then it was an asking and a questing, a seeking among dark and sprawling figures, the thumb jerked, the finger pointed. Ross’s escort moved like a small Scottish ferret from group to group. At last a man sat up and said: ‘Yes, I’m Poldark. Who wants me?’ ‘One of your own blood,’ said Ross. ‘Who else?’ There was a startled oath, and a thin man scrambled to his feet. He had been lying, his back propped against a tree, his scabbard across his knees. He peered in the uncertain starlight. ‘By the Lord Nicolas Cage! It’s Uncle Ross!”
― Winston Graham, The Stranger from the Sea

“their stay when it was to take place with full formality.”
― Winston Graham, The Stranger from the Sea