Росс Полдарк

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.

Having come this far, she was too wise to press further. Another and less elevated lesson she had learned in married life was that if she wheedled long enough and discreetly enough, she quite often got her own way in the end.

"If you love someone," said Demelza, "tesn't a few bruises on the back that are going to count. It's whether that other one loves you in return. If he do, then he can only hurt your body. He can't hurt your heart."

"You have no heart," she said. "That's what I can't fathom. You love me but you have no heart."

<...> she was learning fast that people, even well-bred people like these, had a surprising tendency to take you at your own valuation.

"Man's got a mark on his face, Mummie."
"Hush, dear. You must not say such things."
"But he has. He has, Mummie!"
"And I've washed it and washed it and it won't come off," Ross assured him.

The better part of two hours had passed before they left the shop, both looking rather flushed and guilty as if they had been engaged in some not quite respectable pleasure.

"But a man," Demelza said, "even a kind one, can sometimes be cruel wi'out knowing it."
"And a woman," Ross said, pulling her down again, "never knows when a subject must be dropped."
She lay quiet against him, knowing a last word but not saying it.

"It's not a week since he [Francis] and Aunt Agatha had a cursing match across the dinner table, and Mrs. Tabb listening open-mouthed."
"Aunt Agatha won?"
"Oh, without question. But it is such a bad example for the servants."

"<...> What is there in us, Ross, that makes us so uncomfortable to live with?"
"You malign us, my dear. It is only that, like most families, we are never all happy at one time."

She had become the intruder: two were company and three none.

It was not Ross Poldark, gentleman farmer of Nampara, and his maid, whom he had married because it was better than being alone. They were a man and a woman, with no inequality between them. She was older than her years and he younger; and they walked home hand in hand through the slanting shadows of the new darkness.

"This is Demelza of whom you've heard me speak," Ross said. "This is Mistress Elizabeth Poldark." Two women, he thought. Made of the same substance? Earthenware and porcelain.

Natural enough that in the old days men were sun worshippers; especially in England, where the sun was elusive and fitful and always welcome, in a land of mists and cloud and drifting rain.

Life seemed to be teaching him that the satisfaction of most appetites carried in them the seeds of frustration, that it was the common delusion of all men to imagine otherwise.

The acme of futility was to regret a pleasure that was past.

Ross finished his pacing and stared down at the sandy earth. The eternal enigma of the prospector faced him: whether this acre of ground held under its surface riches or frustration. Time and work and patience...

<...> fear and fascination are yokefellows, oxen out of step but pulling in the same direction <...>

A perverse spirit within him was glad that he was not to have the easy way of meeing the scurrilous gossip. Let them talk till their tongues dropped out.

Some women had minds like addle-gutters; if there was no stench they had to create one.