“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.”

“But fear and fascination are yokefellows, oxen out of step but pulling in the same direction...”

“Men's tongues in some things outrun women's.”

“The most frightening blazing anger was alive in her now. It was not only Elizabeth that she could have killed but Ross. She could have thrown every piece of crockery at him, and knives and forks too. Indeed she could have attacked him knife in hand. Fundamentally there was nothing meek or mild about her. She was a fighter, and it showed now.”

“I suspect that for a good deal of the time you live in a sort of glass case, not knowing real enthusiasm or genuine emotion; or feeling them perhaps at second hand, feeling them sometimes because you think you ought to, not because you really do.”

“...Here, beast, you shall be the chairman, and mind you call us to order." He leaned forward and dropped the cat on the empty seat.”

“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.”

“But was any future, anyone's future, unfraught by hazards of some sort? The only security was death. So long as one wanted to go on living on had to accept the risks. Well, she accepted them...”

“It isn't very pretty to have been made a fool of by one's own feelings,' he said. 'To take childish promises and build a--a castle out of them...”

“He wondered if the real world was that one in which men fought for policies and principles and died or lived gloriously - or more often miserably - for the sake of an abstract word like patriotism or independence, or if reality belonged to the humble people and the common land.”

“Do you believe we are masters of ourselves, or merely dance like puppets on strings having the illusion of independence?”