Quotes from 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.

You could not have grown up in such a house, that had such businesses in it, without having a pretty good idea of what was what—of what could go into what; and what could come out. Do you follow?

Hate you!' I said. 'When I have fifty proper reasons for hating you, already; and only—' Only love you, I wanted to say. I didn't say it, though. What can I tell you? If she could still be proud, then so, for now, could I . . . I didn't need to say it, anyway: she could read the words in my face.

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.

My hair, after all, turned out quite ordinary. My face was a commonplace face. I could pick a plain lock, I could cut a plain key; I could bounce a coin and say, from the ring, if the coin were good or bad.—But anyone can do those things, who is taught them.

Eppure, anche membra di cera devono cedere alla fine al calore delle mani che le muovono. Arriva una notte in cui, finalmente, mi arrendo alle sue.

E feci un'altra riverenza strizzando l'occhio. Due cose curiose da fare assieme , e non vi consiglierei di provare: poiché temo che la strizzatina d'occhio abbia sbilanciato la riverenza, e sono certa che la riverenza abbia sciupato la strizzatina.

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.

Their friendship sometimes struck Frances as being like a piece of soap – like a piece of ancient kitchen soap that had got worn to the shape of her hand, but which had been dropped to the floor so many times it was never quite free of its bits of cinder.

A thirteen-year-old girl had got herself pregnant, and had been badly beaten by her labourer father.

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.

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

She loved these walks through London. She seemed, as she made them, to become porous, to soak in detail after detail; or else, like a battery, to become charged. Yes, that was it, she thought, as she turned a corner: it wasn't a liquid creeping, it was a tingle, something electric, something produced as if by the friction of her shoes against the streets. She was at her truest, it seemed to her, in these tingling moments—these moments when, paradoxically

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.

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

and at last, like a portly matron letting out the laces of her stays, she was herself again.

Some time in the night I woke, and the barn was full of cows: they stood in a circle and looked us over, and one of them coughed like a man. Don't tell me that's natural.

I mean this book to be different to that one. I mean this writting not to turn me back upon my own thoughts, but to serve, like the chloral, to keep the thoughts from coming at all.

I said slowly that, yes, I had seen wretched things there. I said I had seen women unable to speak, because the matrons kept them silent. I had seen women harm themselves, for the variety of it. I had seen women driven mad. There was a woman dying there, I said, because she was kept so cold and badly fed. There was another who had put out her own eye—

she had seemed to be quivering, to be ringing, like a wine glass that had just been struck.

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.

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.

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

I said, Had they any Jewesses? and she answered that there were always a number of Jewesses, and they liked to make 'a particular trouble' over the preparation of their dishes. She had encountered that sort of behaviour, amongst the Jewesses, at other prisons.