Quotes from Sarah Waters

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

Oh, but this,' I think I say, 'is perfect! This is all I have longed for! What are you gazing at? Do you suppose a girl is sitting here? That girl is lost! She has been drowned! She is lying, fathoms deep. Do you think she has arms and legs, with flesh and cloth upon them? Do you think she has hair? She has only bones, stripped white! She is as white as a page of paper! She is a book, from which the words have peeled and drifted--

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.

I seem to have been cross, somehow, all the time when I was a girl. I was horrid... You're supposed to grow out of horridness, aren't you? I don't think I ever grew out of mine. Sometimes I think it's still inside me, like something nasty I swallowed that got stuck.

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.

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

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.

Is this desire? How queer that I, of all people, should not know! But I thought desire smaller, neater; I supposed it bound to its own organs as taste is bound to the mouth, vision to the eye. This feeling haunts and inhabits me, like a sickness. It covers me, like skin.

I felt that thread that had come between us, tugging, tugging at my heart—so hard, it hurt me.

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!

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

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

They made her feel lonelier, suddenly, than she had ever felt before. She went creeping into her room and undressed without lighting a candle, then lay curled in bed in a ferment of misery. 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 . . .

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

The best thing to do was to brazen it out, throw your head back, walk with a swagger, make a 'character' of yourself. It was tiring, sometimes, when you hadn't the energy for it; that's all.

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

Can't people do hurtful things, sometimes, and not even know they're doing them?

The jury had persuaded themselves that he was decent, because they had wanted to think that in his shoes they would have been decent too. They had no idea how decency, loyalty, courage, how it all shrivelled away when one was frightened.