Quotes from Sarah Waters

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

The words used to drive me into secret rages, 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.

How easy it was, she thought unhappily as she did it, for men and women. They could stand in a street and argue, flirt - they could kiss, make love, do anything at all - and the world indulged them.

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

Kitty's gone, Flo. Like Lilian. Believe me, there's more chance of her coming back!' I began to smile. 'And if she does, you can go to her, and I won't say a word. And if Kitty comes for me, you can do similar. And then, I suppose, we shall have our paradises - and will be able to wave to one another from our separate clouds. But till then - till then, Flo, can't we go on kissing, and just be glad?

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.

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

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

Yes, Emily Dickenson -- a rather exhausting poet, now I come to think of it. All that breathlessness and skipping about. What's wrong with nice, long lines and a jaunty rhythm?

I remember weeping... at the silence, the stillness, the turning passages and cluttered walls. I supposed then that those things would be strange to me for ever, I felt their strangeness making me strange--make me a thing of points and hooks, a burr, a splinter in the gullet of the house.

When I see her,' I said, 'it's like - I don't know what it's like. It's like I never saw anything at all before.

I have been being careful since the first minute I saw you. I am the Queen of Carefulness. I shall go on being careful for ever, if you like - so long as I might be a bit reckless, sometimes, when we are quite alone

Your heart—as you call it—and hers are alike, after all: they are like mine, like everyone's. They resemble nothing so much as those meters you will find on gas-pipes: they only perk up and start pumping when you drop coins in.

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.

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

She will laugh. The sound is as strange, at Briar, as I imagine it must be in a prison or a church. Sometimes, she will sing. Once we talk of dancing. She rises and lifts her skirt, to show me a step. Then she pulls me to my feet, and turns and turns me; and I feel, where she presses against me, the quickening beat of her heart - I feel it pass from her to me and become mine.

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

I should have been sorry for her, at any other time; but for now if they had laid her and ten more ladies like her down upon the floor and told me my way out was across their backs, I'd have run it with clogs on.

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.

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

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.

If I had said, I love you, she would have said it back; and everything would have changed. I might have saved her. I might have found a way—-I don't know what-—to keep her from her fate.

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

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