Top 100 Sarah Waters Quotes
#2. Now she has turned up, saying all the things I dreamed she'd say.
Sarah Waters
#3. I give myself up to darkness; and wish I may never again be required to lift my head to the light.
Sarah Waters
#4. And yet, I seemed to feel my eyes bound, too, with bands of silk. And at my throat there was a velvet collar.
Sarah Waters
#5. We have a name for your disease. We call it a hyper-aesthetic one. You have been encouraged to over-indulge yourself in literature; and have inflamed your organs of fancy.
Sarah Waters
#6. Marriages are like pianos. They go in and out of tune.
Sarah Waters
#7. I've given up reading the papers. Since the world's so obviously bent on killing itself, I decided months ago to sit back and let it.
Sarah Waters
#8. They might be kind, I thought. They might be sensible and good. They will not be like you.
But I did not say it. I knew it would mean nothing to her. I said something - something ordinary and mild, I cannot think what. And after a time she came and kissed my cheek, and then she left me.
Sarah Waters
#9. Some things are so frightful that a bit of madness is the only sane response. You know that, don't you?
Sarah Waters
#10. It was then she said I had grown cynical. I said, that I had always been cynical - she had only never called it that. She had said rather that I was brave. She had called me an original. She had seemed to admire me for it. That
Sarah Waters
#11. Miss Craven held up a pair she thought would fit me - monstrous great things they were, of course, and I thought she smiled as she held them.
Sarah Waters
#12. It had three or four book-cases, all of them very full, and a rack of wands, with newspapers and magazines hung out upon them like dripping laundry.
Sarah Waters
#13. She said, 'It's real, isn't it?'
Lilian answered after a pause, with a bowed head, in a murmur. 'Yes, it's real. It's the only real thing.
Sarah Waters
#14. Why is it we can never love the people we ought to?
Sarah Waters
#15. I don't want to understand you,' I say tiredly. 'I wish you would not speak at all.
Sarah Waters
#16. It was like a cure, being with Lilian. It made one feel like a piece of wax being cradled in a soft, warm palm.
Sarah Waters
#17. There had been romances in my schooldays
but all my friends had had those; we were forever sending each other Valentines, writing sonnets on the prefect's eyes ... This wasn't like that. It was a thing of the heart and the head and the body. A real, true thing, grown-up.
Sarah Waters
#18. Undressing myself had no fun in it, now I had undressed her.
Sarah Waters
#19. It was like kissing the darkness. As if the darkness had life, had a shape, had taste, was warm and glib.
Sarah Waters
#20. Never occurred to her. She desperately tried to think through the implications of it.
Sarah Waters
#21. We were thinking of secrets. Real secrets, and snide. Too many to count. When I try now to sort out who knew what and who knew nothing, who knew everything and who was a fraud, I have to stop and give it up, it makes my head spin.
Sarah Waters
#22. The Barbers had said they would arrive by three. It was like waiting to begin
Sarah Waters
#23. His throat bulges queerly, as men's throats do: as if inviting the blow that will crush it.
Sarah Waters
#25. Your twisting is done
you have the last thread of my heart. I wonder: when the thread grows slack, will you feel it?
Sarah Waters
#26. You have brought your own ideas with you into the gaol,' Miss Haxby said, after a moment. 'But our ways at Millbank - as you can see - are rather narrow ones.
Sarah Waters
#27. I did not care. I cared for nothing, now. I had kept up my nerve and my spirit, all that time. I had waited for my chance of escaping and got nowhere.
Sarah Waters
#28. The rest of us become narrow and mean when we live falsely. I'm sick to death of living falsely. I've been doing it for years.
Sarah Waters
#29. There seemed no motion, no rhythm, in all the world, but that which I had set up, between her legs, with one wet fingertip.
Sarah Waters
#30. No-one speaks. No-one moves ( ... ). We glide, softly, in silence, into our dark and separate hells
Sarah Waters
#31. She closed her eyes and let the rain fall on her face,
and after another second, I could not have said what were raindrops, and what tears.
Sarah Waters
#32. life is crap but, every day is an experience
Sarah Waters
#33. For I could not want her now, more than I could a lover.
But I could not want a lover, more than I want freedom.
Sarah Waters
#34. My nan was a nursery maid. Most people weren't in big houses. They were maids of all work.
Sarah Waters
#35. I might be weary or stupid; I might be nauseous with drink; I might be sore, at the hips, with the ache of my monthlies, but the opening of this box, as I have said, never ceased to stir me - I was like a dog twitching and slavering to hear his mistress call out Bone!
Sarah Waters
#36. In short, Nance, even was you going to the very devil himself, your mother and I would rather see you fly from us in joy, than stay with us in sorrow - and grow, maybe, to hate us, for keeping you from your fate.
Sarah Waters
#37. The jury had persuaded themselves that he was decent, because they had wanted to think that in his shoes they would have been decent too. They had no idea how decency, loyalty, courage, how it all shrivelled away when one was frightened.
Sarah Waters
#38. The scullery roof had sprung a leak: she put down a bowl to catch the drips, but the rainwater spread and darkened, to make treasure maps and Whistler nocturnes of the walls and ceiling.
Sarah Waters
#39. I knew that Kitty and I felt just the same- only, of course, about different things. I should have remembered this, later.
Sarah Waters
#40. Just so did they want to crush our friendship, now. It was against the rules. I
Sarah Waters
#41. It was done the day you took me to that house in Bryanston Square, she said. Or even, the time before that, when you bought me tea. We stood in the sun, and you closed your eyes and I looked at your face ... I think it was done then, Julia.
Sarah Waters
#42. There is no patience so terrible as that of the deranged.
Sarah Waters
#43. I love you, that is a simple thing to say...but my spirit does not love yours, it is entwined with it.
Sarah Waters
#44. We see what a punishing business it is, simply being alive.
Sarah Waters
#45. What does it say?" I said, when I had. She said, "It is filled with all the words for how I want you ... Look.
Sarah Waters
#46. seen something in their poses, for, 'Spoony!
Sarah Waters
#47. What did she want? Frances couldn't tell. She wasn't sure she cared any more. There had been too much dancing back and forth. The night had been over-stretched: it had lost its tension.
Sarah Waters
#48. I was encouraged to be imaginative and read, and it was a great childhood for a budding writer because I had the time and the freedom to go into a world of my own.
Sarah Waters
#49. I would rather visit Selina, than go to Garden Court to visit Helen
for Helen is as full of wedding talk as any of them, but Selina they have so removed from ordinary rules and habits, she might be living, cold and graceful, on the surface of the moon.
Sarah Waters
#50. I would go down to the kitchen, saying 'How do you do?' to whoever I met there: ... 'How are you, Mrs. Cakebread?' (That was the cook: that really was her name, it wasn't a joke and no-one laughed it it.)
Sarah Waters
#51. Did she remember, how we laughed and blushed? 'Pa used to say your face was like the red heart on a playing card
mine, he said, was like the diamond. Do you remember, Helen, how Pa said that?
Sarah Waters
#52. Novels are nothing but evolution, but there does come a point when that stops, and the story is sealed within the pages of the book. That doesn't happen with a play. Even performances are different every night.
Sarah Waters
#53. Tricky was a plain-faced man with a very handsome voice - a voice like the sound of a clarinet, at once liquid and penetrating, and lovely to listen to.
Sarah Waters
#54. When she spoke at last, I knew at once that she was rather drunk. "Seen something you fancy, Nancy? ... " she said.
I swallowed, unsure of what reply to make to her. She walked closer, then stopped a few paces from me, and continued to fix me with the same even, arrogant gaze.
Sarah Waters
#55. It made me giddy. It made me blush, worse than before. It was like liquor. It made me drunk. I drew away. When her breath came now upon my mouth, it came very cold. My mouth was wet, from hers. I said, in a whisper,
'Do you feel it?
Sarah Waters
#56. How easy it was, she thought unhappily as she did it, for men and women. They could stand in a street and argue, flirt - they could kiss, make love, do anything at all - and the world indulged them.
Sarah Waters
#57. For a time, all was still: for the yards there, like the grounds, are desperately bleak, all dirt and gravel - there is not so much as a blade of grass to be shivered by the breezes, or a worm or a beetle for a bird to swoop for.
Sarah Waters
#58. My parents were the first in our family to go to grammar school. My grandparents were in service.
Sarah Waters
#59. I wouldn't mind being a fly on the wall in a few Victorian parlours.
Sarah Waters
#60. She scissored the curls away, and - toms, grow easily sentimental over their haircuts, but I remember this sensation very vividly - it was not like she was cutting hair, it was as if I had a pair of wings beneath my shoulder-blades, that the flesh had all grown over, and she was slicing free ...
Sarah Waters
#61. Don't you know that it is the same for locksmiths with spirits as with love? Spirits laugh at them.
Sarah Waters
#62. If I were to die today, she thought, and someone were to think over my life, they'd never know that moments like this, here on the Horseferry Road, between a Baptist chapel and a tobacconist's, were the truest things in it.
Sarah Waters
#63. I love research. Sometimes I think writing novels is just an excuse to allow myself this leisurely time of getting to know a period and reading its books and watching its films. I see it as a real treat.
Sarah Waters
#64. It was only later that I wondered about it and tried to look back. But by then I could only see that there was once a time when we had walked apart; and then a time when we walked together.
Sarah Waters
#65. She said that; and I knew then that, careful as I have been - still and secret and silent as I have been, in my high room - she has been watching me, as Miss Ridley watches, and Miss Haxby.
Sarah Waters
#66. She wore a boiled shirt and a bow-tie, and her hair, though long and bound, was sleek with oil. She was about two- or three-and-thirty, and her waist was thick; but her upper lip, at least, was dark as a boy's. They would have called her terribly handsome, I guessed, in about 1880.
Sarah Waters
#67. Perhaps, however, it is the same with spinsters as with ghosts; and one has to be of their ranks in order to see them at all.
Sarah Waters
#68. Only when the little charade was nearly complete did Frances understand what it was all about. The spot at which Lilian had been grasping lay just above her heart. She had been drawing an imaginary stake from it.
Sarah Waters
#69. She was about to be married, and was frightened to death. And no-one would love her, ever again.
Sarah Waters
#70. Modern dances always seem to me so vulgar. So much hopping about; like a scene from a mental ward!
Sarah Waters
#71. I seem to have been cross, somehow, all the time when I was a girl. I was horrid ... You're supposed to grow out of horridness, aren't you? I don't think I ever grew out of mine. Sometimes I think it's still inside me, like something nasty I swallowed that got stuck.
Sarah Waters
#72. But for now there was this, and it was enough, it was more than they could have hoped for: the two of them in their stone corner, their dark clothes bleeding into the dusk, lights being kindled across the city, and a few pale stars in the sky.
Sarah Waters
#73. Oh, for shame! Nancy, have you never seen Florrie's face in a chrysanthemum, or a rose?'
'Never.' I said. 'Though there was a flounder for sale on a fishmonger's barrow, in Whitechapel yesterday, and the likeness was quite uncanny. I very nearly brought it home ...
Sarah Waters
#74. As far as Frances was concerned, gardening was simply open-air housework.
Sarah Waters
#75. My locket hangs in my closet beside the glass, the only shining thing among so many shadows.
Sarah Waters
#76. But lurid touches were everywhere, she saw with dismay. It was as if a giant mouth had sucked a bag of boiled sweets and then given the house a lick.
Sarah Waters
#78. Everyone's so narrow and mean and
'
'No. Only a few people are. But the rest of us
don't you see? The rest of us become narrow and mean when we live falsely ...
Sarah Waters
#79. She supposed that houses, after all - like the lives that were lived in them - were mostly made of space. It was the spaces, in fact, which counted, rather than the bricks.
Sarah Waters
#80. The early '20s were like the waist of an hourglass. Lots of things were hurtling toward it and squeezing through it and then hurtling out the other side.
Sarah Waters
#81. Don't you think that queer? That a common coarse-featured woman might drink morphia and be sent to gaol for it, while I am saved and sent to visit her - and all because I am a lady?
Sarah Waters
#82. I never expected my books to do even as well as they have. I still feel grateful for it, every single day.
Sarah Waters
#83. Now i begin to feel a longing so great, so sharp, i fear it will never be assuaged. i think it will mount, and mount, and make me mad, or kill me.
Sarah Waters
#84. My story is the story of many postwar British families. Upward mobility. A council house and then new affluence.
Sarah Waters
#85. It was as though their life, thought Frances, were being mercilessly spooled back on to a reel; or as if, one by one, the stitches that had fastened them together were being unpicked.
Sarah Waters
#86. People say, 'You're like Dickens', but I'm not like Dickens. Zadie Smith is a Dickensian writer because she's writing about society now, just as Dickens was writing about his society.
Sarah Waters
#87. Sometimes I think I'd be perfectly happy to go on rewriting 'Tipping the Velvet' forever because it was so much fun.
Sarah Waters
#88. I sleep, and dream I am moving, swiftly, in a high-prowed boat, upon a dark and silent water.
Sarah Waters
#89. But it's the simple and the good that are meant to suffer in this world - ain't it, though!
Sarah Waters
#90. Being in love, you know ... it's not like having a canary, in a cage. When you lose one sweetheart, you can't just go out and get another to replace her.
Sarah Waters
#91. My spirit does not love yours - it is entwined with it. Our flesh does not love: our flesh is the same, and longs to leap to itself. It must do that, or wither!
Sarah Waters
#92. My happiness is nothing to him," she said. "Only his books! He has made me like a book. I am not meant to be taken, and touched, and liked. I am meant to keep here, in dim light, forever!
Sarah Waters
#93. Don't you be thinking,' she says, 'on things that are done and can't be changed. All right, dear girl? You think of the time to come.
Sarah Waters
#94. I've ended up feeling fonder of 'The Paying Guests' than of any of my other novels.
Sarah Waters
#95. They was told it too, perhaps. Does that make it true? Maybe. Maybe not.
Sarah Waters
#96. And perhaps there is a limit to the grieving that the human heart can do. As when one adds salt to a tumbler of water, there comes a point where simply no more will be absorbed.
Sarah Waters
#97. I'm sorry you aren't as brave as you thought you were. But don't punish me because of it.
Sarah Waters
#98. I have some knowledge of the time that may be misspent, clinging to fictions and supposing them truths.
Sarah Waters
#99. What was the use of her being alive? Her heart was some desiccated thing: a prune, a fossil, a piece of clinker. Her mouth might as well be filled with ashes. It was all utterly hopeless and futile ...
Sarah Waters
#100. I barely knew I had skin before I met you.
Sarah Waters
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