Quotes from Sarah Waters

Would it be all right, wondered Frances, if they were to allow themselves to be happy? Wouldn't it be a sort of insult to all those others who had been harmed? Or oughtn't they to do all they could—didn't they almost have a duty—to make one small brave thing happen at last?

I wondered whether the writer of that one had once wished she was Lizzy, but feared that she was more like Mary; I know I did.

you said I like to be admired, do you remember? You said I would love anybody who admired me. Dont hate this hard thing I am about to say my darling but sometimes I think its you that would love anybody. Sometimes it seems so astonishing that you should love me that I think you must only want me because you lost so many other things. It isnt just that, is it?

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.

But in his face I see, at last, how much I want her. For

The experience can leave one feeling drained, but also oddly wakeful and edgy, and now my mind, with nothing to anchor it, began to run over the details of the past few hours like a film on a loop.

I shivered again, remembering. I put the tip of one finger to my tongue. It tasted sharp—like vinegar, like blood. Like money.

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...

You are a lady,' he says softly, 'and young, and handsome.—I don't speak from gallantry now, you know that. I say only what is true. You might do anything. ' 'You are a man,' I answer. 'Men's truths are different from ladies'. I may do nothing, I assure you.

Funny how hard it is to keep talking, when someone asks you to start and not stop.

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.

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

Why, because I must! Because how could I rest, when the world is so cruel and hard, and yet might be so sweet. . . The kind of work I do is its own kind of fulfilment, whether it's successful or not." She drank her tea. "It's like love." "Love!" I sniffed. "You think love is its own reward, then?" "Don't you?

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

She began to teach herself Esperanto, reciting phrases as she polished and swept.

because on the one hand I wanted desperately to live up to my own reputation for cleverness, and on the other it seemed very unfair, that that cleverness, which I had never asked for, could be turned into something with which to cut me down.

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

When she heard the splash and gurgle of tea being poured from the pot, followed by the rattle of china as he carried the cups to his bedroom, she longed so dismally for a cup of tea of her own that she nearly wept.

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.

If people like me don't work, it's because they look at the world, at all the injustice and the muck, and all they see is a nation falling in upon itself, and taking them with it. But the muck has new things growing out of it - wonderful things! - new habits of working, new kinds of people, new ways of being alive and in love ...

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.

How ill a man may grow,' he says, 'from the sight of the spilling of a little of his own blood. What monsters you females must be, to endure this, month upon month. No wonder you are prone to madness.

sometimes I am troubled. I remember poor, good-tempered Gyp;

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