Sarah Waters quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Sarah Waters

Sarah Waters Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Sarah Waters on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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

Your twisting is done
you have the last thread of my heart. I wonder: when the thread grows slack, will you feel it?

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

But it's the simple and the good that are meant to suffer in this world - ain't it, though!

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.

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

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

They was told it too, perhaps. Does that make it true? Maybe. Maybe not.

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.

Doesn't it seem to you, now you are here, that anything might be real, since Millbank is?

Marriages are like pianos. They go in and out of tune.

And yet, I seemed to feel my eyes bound, too, with bands of silk. And at my throat there was a velvet collar.

rooms seemed changed. I took to

Clad not exactly as a boy but, rather confusingly, as the boy I would have been, had I been more of a girl

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.

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

My parents were the first in our family to go to grammar school. My grandparents were in service.

No-one speaks. No-one moves ( ... ). We glide, softly, in silence, into our dark and separate hells

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.

The bad blood rose in me, just like wine.

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

It's a curious, wanting thing.

seen something in their poses, for, 'Spoony!

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

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.

What does it say?" I said, when I had. She said, "It is filled with all the words for how I want you ... Look.

For was that all, she thought bleakly, that love ever was? Something that saved one from loneliness? A sort of insurance policy against not counting?

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.

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

The Barbers had said they would arrive by three. It was like waiting to begin

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

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.

If I seemed strange, and conscious of myself, what was that to her? We were all strange, there.

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

I used to hate flying. I would sit there, rigid, convinced that if I relaxed, the plane would drop out of the sky.

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

There seemed no motion, no rhythm, in all the world, but that which I had set up, between her legs, with one wet fingertip.

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.

You have been put too much to literary work,' he said on one of his visits, 'and that is the cause of your complaint.

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

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

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

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.

I have some knowledge of the time that may be misspent, clinging to fictions and supposing them truths.

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.

She was at her truest, it seemed to her, in these tingling moments - these moments when, paradoxically, she was also at her most anonymous.

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.

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

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.

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.

Weep all the artful tears you like. You shall never make my hard heart the softer.

All I can do is write about whatever grabs me.

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

I'm not so sure about him.

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.

As far as Frances was concerned, gardening was simply open-air housework.

I wouldn't mind being a fly on the wall in a few Victorian parlours.

Sometimes the shortest journeys take longest, don't they?

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

Don't you know that it is the same for locksmiths with spirits as with love? Spirits laugh at them.

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

It was a great childhood. We weren't especially wealthy or anything, but I felt I had a kind of safety and freedom.

I knew I'd always be a second-rate academic, and I thought, 'Well, I'd rather be a second-rate novelist or even a third-rate one'.

Modern dances always seem to me so vulgar. So much hopping about; like a scene from a mental ward!

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

We see what a punishing business it is, simply being alive.

And so you see it is love- not scorn,not malice; only love- that makes me harm her, in the end.

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

Even ashes are a part of your freedom.

She was about to be married, and was frightened to death. And no-one would love her, ever again.

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.

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

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.

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.

Why do gentlemen's voices carry so clearly, when women's are so easily stifled?

There is no patience so terrible as that of the deranged.

I barely knew I had skin before I met you.

His feeling haunts and inhabits me, like a sickness. it covers me, like skin.

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

Well, that was the clerk class for you. They might be completely without culture, but they certainly knew how to make themselves comfortable.

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

I love you, that is a simple thing to say...but my spirit does not love yours, it is entwined with it.

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

life is crap but, every day is an experience

Everybody in my world knew that regular work was only another name for being robbed and dying of boredom.

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.

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

I used to write at home, but it didn't ever occur to me to be a writer.

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

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

It was like a cure, being with Lilian. It made one feel like a piece of wax being cradled in a soft, warm palm.

Some things are so frightful that a bit of madness is the only sane response. You know that, don't you?

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

His throat bulges queerly, as men's throats do: as if inviting the blow that will crush it.

I'm sorry you aren't as brave as you thought you were. But don't punish me because of it.

The vase was placed upon my desk, and there were orange-blossoms in it - orange-blossoms, in an English winter!

Why is it we can never love the people we ought to?

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

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