Sarah Waters Quotes

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
And for a moment I though I would tell her, that it would be the easiest and the slightest thing imaginable- that after all, if anyone would understand it, she would. That I need only say, 'I am in love, Helen! I am in love! There is a girl so rare and marvelous and strange, and- Helen, she has all my life in her!
Sarah Waters
She was about to be married, and was frightened to death. And no-one would love her, ever again.
Sarah Waters
I shivered again, remembering. I put the tip of one finger to my tongue. It tasted sharp—like vinegar, like blood.Like money.
Sarah Waters
The vase was placed upon my desk, and there were orange-blossoms in it—orange-blossoms, in an English winter!
Sarah Waters
Her friend - and her partner on the stage. You will not believe me, but making love to Kitty - a thing done in passion, but always, too, in shadow and silence, and with an ear half-cocked for the sound of footsteps on the stairs - making love to Kitty and posing at her side in a shaft of limelight, before a thousand pairs of eyes, to a script I knew by heart, in an attitude I had laboured for hours to perfect - these things were not so very different. A double act is always twice the act that the audience thinks it; beyond our songs, our steps, our bits of business with coins and canes and flowers, there was a private language, in which we held an endless, delicate exchange of which the crowd knew nothing. This was a language not of the tongue but of the body, its vocabulary the pressure of a finger or a palm, the nudging of a hip, the holding or breaking of a gaze, that said, You are too slow - you got too fast - not there but here - that's good - that's better! It was as if we walked before the crimson curtain, lay down upon the boards and kissed and fondled - and were clapped, and cheered, and paid for it!
Sarah Waters
But my thoughts were more like poisons. I had so many, they made me sick.
Sarah Waters
Undressing myself had no fun in it, now I had undressed her.
Sarah Waters
It's a curious, wanting thing.
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
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
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
I had a very clear vision, of Selina with her hair about her shoulders, a crimson hat upon her head, a velvet coat, ice-skates - I must have been remembering some picture. I imagined myself beside her, the air coming sharply into our mouths. I imagined how it would be if I took her, not to Italy, but only to Marishes, to my sister's house; if I sat with her at supper, and shared her room, and kissed her -
Sarah Waters
I'm sorry you aren't as brave as you thought you were. But don't punish me because of it.
Sarah Waters
She shook her head, and closed her eyes. I felt her weariness then, and with it, my own. I felt it dark and heavy upon me, darker and heavier than any drug they ever gave me - it seemed heavy as death. I looked at the bed. I have seemed to see our kisses there sometimes, I've seen them hanging in the curtains, like bats, ready to swoop. Now, I thought, I might jolt the post and they would only fall, and shatter, and turn to powder.
Sarah Waters
But it's the simple and the good that are meant to suffer in this world—ain't it, though!
Sarah Waters
It was heavy, and I staggered when I lifted it; but it was strangely satifying to have a real burden upon my shoulders – a kind of counterweight to my terrible heaviness of heart.
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
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
But the more I think it, the more I want her, the more my desire rises and swells.
Sarah Waters
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
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
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
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
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
Don't panic. Midway through writing a novel, I have regularly experienced moments of bowel-curdling terror, as I contemplate the drivel on the screen before me and see beyond it, in quick succession, the derisive reviews, the friends' embarrassment, the failing career, the dwindling income, the repossessed house, the divorce . . . Working doggedly on through crises like these, however, has always got me there in the end. Leaving the desk for a while can help. Talking the problem through can help me recall what I was trying to achieve before I got stuck. Going for a long walk almost always gets me thinking about my manuscript in a slightly new way. And if all else fails, there's prayer. St Francis de Sales, the patron saint of writers, has often helped me out in a crisis. If you want to spread your net more widely, you could try appealing to Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, too.
Sarah Waters
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
She said, 'It is filled with all the words for how I want you.
Sarah Waters
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
It is a world that is made of love. Did you think there is only the kind of love your sister has 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.
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 wished for a moment that they were all children again. It still seemed extraordinary to her, that everything had turned out the way it had.
Sarah Waters
But, here was a curious thing. The more I tried to give up thinking of her, the more I said to myself, 'She's nothing to you', the harder I tried to pluck the idea of her out of my heart, the more she stayed there.
Sarah Waters
I felt that thread that had come between us, tugging, tugging at my heart—so hard, it hurt me.
Sarah Waters
Marriages are like pianos. They go in and out of tune.
Sarah Waters
Why do gentlemen's voices carry so clearly, when women's are so easily stifled?
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
One time, two years ago, I took a draught of morphia, meaning to end my life. My mother found me before the life was ended, the doctor drew the poison from my stomach with a syringe, and when I woke, it was to the sound of my own weeping. For I had hoped to open my eyes on Heaven, where my father was; and they had only pulled me back to Hell.
Sarah Waters