Sarah Waters Quotes & Sayings

She said that that was the disadvantage of bringing creatures into the house: one grew used to them, and then, one had the upset of their loss. — Sarah Waters

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

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

I give myself up to darkness; and wish I may never again be required to lift my head to the light. — Sarah Waters

And that was all it took. They smiled at each other across the table, and some sort of shift occurred between them. There was a quickening, a livening- Frances could think of nothing to compare it to save some culinary process. It was like the white of an egg growing pearly in hot water, a milk sauce thickening in the pan. It was as subtle yet as tangible as that. — Sarah Waters

My nan was a nursery maid. Most people weren't in big houses. They were maids of all work. — Sarah Waters

Undressing myself had no fun in it, now I had undressed her. — Sarah Waters

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

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

The best thing to do was to brazen it out, throw your head back, walk with a swagger ... — Sarah Waters

He would be cruel indeed, to put a passion in her, and then to punish her for feeling it. — Sarah Waters

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

I had loved Kitty -I would always love Kitty. But I had lived with her a kind of queer half-life, hiding from my own true self. Since then I had refused to love at all, had become - or so I thought - a creature beyond passion, driving others to their secret, humiliating confessions of lust; but never offering my own. — Sarah Waters

Ours is a world which feels so unsettled and dangerous in large ways, whether it's terrorism or global financial meltdown or climate change - huge things that affect us deeply, and yet things about which we can do, individually, very little. — Sarah Waters

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

I've ended up feeling fonder of 'The Paying Guests' than of any of my other novels. — Sarah Waters

I knew that Kitty and I felt just the same- only, of course, about different things. I should have remembered this, later. — Sarah Waters

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

Helen opened her eyes and gazed into the luminous blue of the sky. Was it crazy, she wondered, to be as grateful as she felt now, for moments like this, in a world that had atomic bombs in it - and concentration camps, and gas chambers? People were still tearing each other into pieces. There was still murder, starvation, unrest, in Poland, Palestine, India - God knew where else. Britain itself was sliding into bankruptcy and decay. Was it a kind of idiocy or selfishness, to want to be able to give yourself over to the trifles: to the parp of the Regent's Park Band; to the sun on your face, the prickle of grass beneath your heels, the movement of cloudy beer in your veins, the secret closeness of your lover? Or were those trifles all you had? Oughtn't you, precisely, to preserve them? To make little crystal drops of them, that you could keep, like charms on a bracelet, to tell against danger when next it came? — Sarah Waters

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

I sleep, and dream I am moving, swiftly, in a high-prowed boat, upon a dark and silent water. — Sarah Waters

I'm interested in stories that aren't getting told: it's where my interests lie. — Sarah Waters

I never expected my books to do even as well as they have. I still feel grateful for it, every single day. — Sarah Waters

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

I barely knew I had skin before I met you. — Sarah Waters

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

But the more I think it, the more I want her, the more my desire rises and swells. — Sarah Waters

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

Do you know how careful my love will make me? See here, look at my hands. Say there's a cobweb spun between them. It's my ambition. And at its centre there's a spider, a color of a jewel. The spider is you. This is how I shall bear you
so gently, so carefully and without jar, you shall not know you are being taken. — Sarah Waters

I must be better, she thought - realising it then, in that moment, for the first time. I must be OK. — Sarah Waters

I love film and, particularly, shorts. You don't get to see them often, and they're a great little form, like a short story. — Sarah Waters

She raised her head when she heard my step, and her gaze met my own, over the matron's dipping shoulder, and her eyes grew bright. I knew then how hard it had been to keep, not just from Millbank but from her. I felt that little quickening. It was just as I imagine a woman must feel, when the baby within her gives its first kick.
Does it matter if I feel that, that is so small, and silent, and secret? — Sarah Waters

Cut like crazy. Less is more. I've often read manuscripts - including my own - where I've got to the beginning of, say, chapter two and have thought: "This is where the novel should actually start." A huge amount of information about character and backstory can be conveyed through small detail. The emotional attachment you feel to a scene or a chapter will fade as you move on to other stories. Be business-like about it. — Sarah Waters

She was like milk - too pale, too pure, too simple. She was made to be spoiled. — Sarah Waters

But he was not like Walter, who might take his pleasure where he chose it. His pleasure had turned, at the last, to a kind of grief; and his love was a love so fierce and so secret it must be satisfied, with a stranger, in a reeking court like this. I knew about that kind of love. I knew how it was to bare your palpitating heart, and be fearful as you did so that the beats should come too loudly, and betray you. — Sarah Waters

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

She will be like everyone, putting on the things she sees the constructions she expects to find there. — Sarah Waters

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

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

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

It was like kissing the darkness. As if the darkness had life, had a shape, had taste, was warm and glib. — Sarah Waters

I was mad about the theatre growing up, really mad. We had a local theatre, the Torch, and I used to usher there. I would see the shows over and over again. — Sarah Waters

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

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

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

How will a person know, Selina, when the soul that has the affinity with hers is near it?" She answered, "She will know. Does she look for air, before she breathes it? This love will be guided to her; and when it comes, she will know. And she will do anything to keep that love about her, then. Because to lose it will be like a death to her. — Sarah Waters

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

Just so did they want to crush our friendship, now. It was against the rules. I — Sarah Waters

I don't want to understand you,' I say tiredly. 'I wish you would not speak at all. — Sarah Waters

You're not sure? Look at your own fingers. Are you not sure, if they are yours? Look at any part of you - it might be me that you are looking at! We are the same, you and I. We have been cut, two halves, from the same piece of shinning matter. Oh, I could say, I love you - that is a simple thing to say, the sort of thing your sister might say to her husband. I could say that in a prison letter, four times a year. but 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! You are like me. — Sarah Waters

The bad blood rose in me, just like wine. — Sarah Waters

There was, of course, the dildo that I have described (though the device, or the instrument, was what I learned, following Diana, to call it: I think the unnecessary euphemism, with its particular odour of the surgery or house of correction, appealed to her; only when really heated would she call the thing by its proper name - and even then she was as likely to ask for Monsieur Dildo, or simply Monsieur). Besides this there was an album of photographs of big-buttocked girls with hairless parts, bearing feathers; also a collection of erotic pamphlets and novels, all hymning the delights of what I would call tommistry but what they, like Diana, called Sapphic Passion. — Sarah Waters

The gloss would fade in about five minutes as the surface dried; but everything faded. The vital thing was to make the most of the moments of brightness. — Sarah Waters

It proved difficult, when it came to it, to part from her mother with a bright goodbye
though, after all, not that difficult, because this was only the beginning, and there were still two or three more goodbyes to come. For the same reason, as she made the walk down to Camberwell and along the Walworth Road, though she tried to gaze at everything in the knowledge that she might soon be taken away from it, she couldn't keep it up, she felt mannered and inauthentic
like an actress, she thought, playing a character to whom the doctor had just delivered the fatal diagnosis. — Sarah Waters

Neuralgia, so she had come along on her own. It was worth it, though. She — Sarah Waters

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

We fitted together like the two halves of an oyster-shell. I was Narcissus, embracing the pond in which I was about to drown. However much we had to hide our love, however guarded we had to be about our pleasure, I could not long be miserable about a thing so very sweet. Nor, in my gladness, could I quite believe that anybody would be anything but happy for me if only they knew. — Sarah Waters

Never occurred to her. She desperately tried to think through the implications of it. — Sarah Waters

She rose from her bed full of new resolutions. 'We must get out and about more,' she told her startled mother. 'We must try different things. We are getting groovy.' She drew up a list of events and activities: concerts, day trips, public meetings. She went in a fit through her address book, writing letters to old friends. She borrowed novels from the library by authors who had never interested her before. She began to teach herself Esperanto, reciting phrases as she polished and swept. — Sarah Waters

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

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

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

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

Mr Bliss looked grave. 'Your brother was very sensible to warn you, Miss Astley - but sadly misinformed. There are no trams in Trafalgur Square - only buses and hansoms, and broughams like our own. Trams are for common people; you should have to go quite as far as Kilburn, I'm afraid, or Camden Town, in order to by struck by a tram — Sarah Waters

Sometimes I think I'd be perfectly happy to go on rewriting 'Tipping the Velvet' forever because it was so much fun. — Sarah Waters

My locket hangs in my closet beside the glass, the only shining thing among so many shadows. — Sarah Waters

There was a prisoner, I said, in the first cell of the second passage. A fair-haired girl, quite young, quite handsome. What did Miss Craven know of her? The matron's face had grown sour when talking of Cook. Now it grew sour again. 'Selina Dawes,' she said. 'A queer one. Keeps her eyes and her mind to herself
that's all I know. I've heard her called the easiest prisoner in the gaol. They say she has never given an hour's trouble since she was brought here. Deep, I call her.' Deep? 'As the ocean. — Sarah Waters

The subliminal mind has many dark, unhappy corners, after all. Imagine something loosening itself from one of those corners. Let's call it a---a germ. And let's say conditions prove right for that germ to develop---to grow, like a child in the womb. What would this little stranger grow into? A sort of shadow-self, perhaps: a Caliban, a Mr Hyde. A creature motivated by all the nasty impulses and hungers the conscious mind had hoped to keep hidden away: things like envy and malice and frustration... — Sarah Waters

Now she has turned up, saying all the things I dreamed she'd say. — Sarah Waters

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

It was odd to see her stepping out of that gloomy place, like a pearl coming out of an oyster. — Sarah Waters

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

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

She sang that night like - I cannot say like an angel, for her songs were all of champagne suppers and strolling in the Burlington Arcade; perhaps, then, like a fallen angel - or yet again like a falling one: she sang like a falling angel might sing with the bounds of heaven fresh burst behind him, and hell still distant and unguessed. And as she did so, I sang with her - not loudly and carelessly like the rest of the crowd, but softly, almost secretly, as if she might hear me the better if I whispered rather than bawled. — Sarah Waters

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

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

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

I suppose I really seemed mad, then; but it was only through the awfulness of having said nothing but the truth, and being thought to be deluded. — Sarah Waters

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

I do love the past but wouldn't want to live in it. — Sarah Waters

The morning has broken - I had thought of the morning like an egg that had split with a crack and was spreading. Before us lay all the green of the green country of England, with its rivers and it's roads and it's hedges, it's churches, it's chimneys, it's rising threads of smoke. The chimneys grew taller, the roads and rivers wider, the threads of smoke more thick, the farther off the country spread; until at last, at the farthest point of all, they made a smudge, a stain, a darkness - a darkness, like the darkness of the coal in a fire - a darkness that was broken, here and there, where the sun caught panes of glass and the golden tips of domes and steeples, with glittering points of light.
'London,' I said 'Oh, London! — Sarah Waters

We can't go on like this. Look at you! It's killing you! And I
I can't do it any longer, not the way we've been doing it till now ... I can't share you with something that passes itself off as a marriage, but is really habit and pride and ... empty embraces, or worse. If I loved you less, I might be able to, but
I can't. I won't. — Sarah Waters

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

I'm taking you out, to meet my friends. I'm taking you,' she put a hand to my cheek, 'to my club. — Sarah Waters

I've never managed to get very far with Henry James. — Sarah Waters

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

I'm not so sure about him. — Sarah Waters

There was a little padded seat beside the rattling panes and mouldy sand-bags, it was the coldest place in the room; but she kept there for an hour and a half, with a shawl about her, shivering, squinting at her stitches, and sneaking sly little glances at the road to the house.
I thought, if that wasn't love, then I was a Dutchman; and if it was love, then lovers were pigeons and geese, and I was glad I was not one of them. — Sarah Waters

I am a sort of villain, and know other villains best. — Sarah Waters

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

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

Then I knew how good you were, to come to me, after all you had seen. The first hour they had me there, do you know what frightened me the most? Oh, it was a torment to me!- far worse than any punishment of theirs. It was the thought that you might stay from me; the thought that I might have driven you away, and with the very thing I meant to keep you near me! — Sarah Waters

My story is the story of many postwar British families. Upward mobility. A council house and then new affluence. — Sarah Waters

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

I should have been sorry for her, at any other time; but for now if they had laid her and ten more ladies like her down upon the floor and told me my way out was across their backs, I'd have run it with clogs on. — Sarah Waters

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

It is a world that is made of love. Did you think there is only the kind of love your sister knows for her husband? Did you think there must be here, a man with whiskers, and over here, a lady in a gown? Haven't I said, there are no whiskers and gowns where spirits are? And what will your sister do if her husband should die, and she should take another? Who will she fly to then, when she has crossed the spheres? For she will fly to someone, we will all fly to someone, we will all return to that piece of shining matter from which our souls were torn with another, two halves of the same. It may be that the husband your sister has now has that other soul, that has the affinity with her soul - I hope it is. But it may be the next man she takes, or it may be neither. It may be someone she would never think to look to on the earth, someone kept from her by some false boundary ... — Sarah Waters

She said, 'It is filled with all the words for how I want you. — Sarah Waters

Decency, loyalty, courage, how it all shrivelled away when one was frightened. She remembered Lilian reaching for her hand as the foreman got to his feet. In the seconds before the verdict, her own grip had tightened like a vice. Had she been about to urge Lilian forward, or to hold her back? She didn't know. She would never know. And the not knowing wasn't like the absence of something, it was like another burden, a different shape and weight from the last. The lightness left her. She — Sarah Waters

The madder he knows you to be, the better. Saves disappointment, don't it? — Sarah Waters