Top 100 Sarah Waters Quotes
#1. I've read all of Sarah Waters's novels which have been translated into Korean.
Park Chan-wook
#2. Weep all the artful tears you like. You shall never make my hard heart the softer.
Sarah Waters
#3. 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
#4. When theatre works, it's like nothing else, and when it doesn't, which is often, it's excruciating. It's perhaps not so excruciating when a novel goes wrong, but there is a kind of magic that can and should happen.
Sarah Waters
#5. 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
#6. If I had said, I love you, she would have said it
back; and everything would have changed. I might have saved her. I might have found a way--I don't know what--to keep her from her fate.
Sarah Waters
#7. seen something in their poses, for, 'Spoony!
Sarah Waters
#8. 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
#9. We see what a punishing business it is, simply being alive.
Sarah Waters
#10. I love you, that is a simple thing to say...but my spirit does not love yours, it is entwined with it.
Sarah Waters
#11. You have been put too much to literary work,' he said on one of his visits, 'and that is the cause of your complaint.
Sarah Waters
#12. There is no patience so terrible as that of the deranged.
Sarah Waters
#14. With every step I took away from her, the movement at my heart and between my legs grew more defined: I felt like a ventriloquist, locking his protesting dolls in to a trunk.
Sarah Waters
#15. 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
#16. Just so did they want to crush our friendship, now. It was against the rules. I
Sarah Waters
#17. I used to write at home, but it didn't ever occur to me to be a writer.
Sarah Waters
#18. I knew that Kitty and I felt just the same- only, of course, about different things. I should have remembered this, later.
Sarah Waters
#19. Read like mad. But try to do it analytically - which can be hard, because the better and more compelling a novel is, the less conscious you will be of its devices. It's worth trying to figure those devices out, however: they might come in useful in your own work.
Sarah Waters
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. For she was the only one, of all of them, to have spared me a pleasant word; and suddenly I longed for time to pass, not for its own sake, but as it would take me back to her.
Sarah Waters
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. My nan was a nursery maid. Most people weren't in big houses. They were maids of all work.
Sarah Waters
#26. Oh, Frances, for somebody so clever you can be awfully dull sometimes. Don't you know the sort of mistake I mean? I was going to have a
Sarah Waters
#27. Don't you like surprises?' No, Frances didn't like surprises. She hated the thought of people plotting and planning on her behalf. She loathed the burden of being delighted once the surprise was disclosed.
Sarah Waters
#28. And evermore the waters worship God;
And bards and prophets tune their mystic lyres
While listening to the music of the waves!
Sarah Josepha Hale
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. Clad not exactly as a boy but, rather confusingly, as the boy I would have been, had I been more of a girl
Sarah Waters
#32. 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
#33. Yes, Emily Dickenson
a rather exhausting poet, now I come to think of it. All that breathlessness and skipping about. What's wrong with nice, long lines and a jaunty rhythm?
Sarah Waters
#34. Don't you know that it is the same for locksmiths with spirits as with love? Spirits laugh at them.
Sarah Waters
#35. 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
#36. I wouldn't mind being a fly on the wall in a few Victorian parlours.
Sarah Waters
#37. Neuralgia, so she had come along on her own. It was worth it, though. She
Sarah Waters
#38. My parents were the first in our family to go to grammar school. My grandparents were in service.
Sarah Waters
#39. But she was used to that by now, used to this kind of waiting, that was slack as worn elastic yet had the tautness of wire.
Sarah Waters
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. I do love the past but wouldn't want to live in it.
Sarah Waters
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. She was at her truest, it seemed to her, in these tingling moments - these moments when, paradoxically, she was also at her most anonymous.
Sarah Waters
#49. 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
#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. 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
#52. I've never managed to get very far with Henry James.
Sarah Waters
#53. I don't want to understand you,' I say tiredly. 'I wish you would not speak at all.
Sarah Waters
#54. Why is it we can never love the people we ought to?
Sarah Waters
#55. Well, that was the clerk class for you. They might be completely without culture, but they certainly knew how to make themselves comfortable.
Sarah Waters
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. Some things are so frightful that a bit of madness is the only sane response. You know that, don't you?
Sarah Waters
#61. Everybody in my world knew that regular work was only another name for being robbed and dying of boredom.
Sarah Waters
#62. He claimed the waters must have, indeed, been healing, because look how hard his journey was on him to get there, and how easy it was on him to get home.
Sarah Addison Allen
#63. And so you see it is love- not scorn,not malice; only love- that makes me harm her, in the end.
Sarah Waters
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. Marriages are like pianos. They go in and out of tune.
Sarah Waters
#68. 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
#69. I used to hate flying. I would sit there, rigid, convinced that if I relaxed, the plane would drop out of the sky.
Sarah Waters
#70. 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
#71. Sometimes the shortest journeys take longest, don't they?
Sarah Waters
#72. I have been being careful since the first minute I saw you. I am the Queen of Carefulness. I shall go on being careful for ever, if you like - so long as I might be a bit reckless, sometimes, when we are quite alone
Sarah Waters
#73. I give myself up to darkness; and wish I may never again be required to lift my head to the light.
Sarah Waters
#74. Now she has turned up, saying all the things I dreamed she'd say.
Sarah Waters
#75. Now the world seemed to her to have become so complex that its problems defied solution. There was only a chaos of conflicts of interest; the whole thing filled her with a sense of futility.
Sarah Waters
#77. His throat bulges queerly, as men's throats do: as if inviting the blow that will crush it.
Sarah Waters
#78. 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
#79. No-one speaks. No-one moves ( ... ). We glide, softly, in silence, into our dark and separate hells
Sarah Waters
#80. 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
#81. It was a great childhood. We weren't especially wealthy or anything, but I felt I had a kind of safety and freedom.
Sarah Waters
#82. She will be like everyone, putting on the things she sees the constructions she expects to find there.
Sarah Waters
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. The madder he knows you to be, the better. Saves disappointment, don't it?
Sarah Waters
#86. 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
#87. 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
#89. life is crap but, every day is an experience
Sarah Waters
#90. The Barbers had said they would arrive by three. It was like waiting to begin
Sarah Waters
#91. 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
#92. The day had begun to feel tinny: a pretend day, a dream day, that for some unaccountable reason she had to go on and on with as if it were real.
Sarah Waters
#93. His feeling haunts and inhabits me, like a sickness. it covers me, like skin.
Sarah Waters
#94. Never occurred to her. She desperately tried to think through the implications of it.
Sarah Waters
#95. He would start it, I think, at the gate of Millbank, the point that every visitor must pass when they arrive to make their tour of the gaols.
Sarah Waters
#96. It was like kissing the darkness. As if the darkness had life, had a shape, had taste, was warm and glib.
Sarah Waters
#97. Undressing myself had no fun in it, now I had undressed her.
Sarah Waters
#98. The vase was placed upon my desk, and there were orange-blossoms in it - orange-blossoms, in an English winter!
Sarah Waters
#99. 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
#100. I like dramas because there's a big overlap between film and fiction, so I feel relatively qualified to talk about plot and characterisation and that sort of thing.
Sarah Waters
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