Quotes from Sarah Waters

My soul left me—I felt it fly from me and lodge in her.

Was this, she thought, what happened when one made friends with a married woman? One automatically got the husband too? - like a crochet pattern, coming free with a magazine?

It was done the day you took me to that house in Bryanston Square, she said. Or even, the time before that, when you bought me tea. We stood in the sun, and you closed your eyes and I looked at your face...I think it was done then, Julia.

And that was all it took. They smiled at each other across the table, and some sort of shift occurred between them. There was a quickening, a livening- Frances could think of nothing to compare it to save some culinary process. It was like the white of an egg growing pearly in hot water, a milk sauce thickening in the pan. It was as subtle yet as tangible as that.

It's a queer thing, being plunged in and out of the dramas of one's patients—especially at night.

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

There had been romances in my schooldays--but all my friends had had those; we were forever sending each other Valentines, writing sonnets on the prefect's eyes... This wasn't like that. It was a thing of the heart and the head and the body. A real, true thing, grown-up.

One gets paid back in the way one deserves.

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. The

A girl, like you—' 'Like me? There are no girls like me.' I

But there was something very appealing about that Fe-Male . I saw myself in it - in the hyphen.

For a time, all was still: for the yards there, like the grounds, are desperately bleak, all dirt and gravel—there is not so much as a blade of grass to be shivered by the breezes, or a worm or a beetle for a bird to swoop for.

In short, Nance, even was you going to the very devil himself, your mother and I would rather see you fly from us in joy, than stay with us in sorrow - and grow, maybe, to hate us, for keeping you from your fate.

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

If I were to die today, she thought, and someone were to think over my life, they'd never know that moments like this, here on the Horseferry Road, between a Baptist chapel and a tobacconist's, were the truest things in it.

You don't think about all these colours when everything's going all right; you'd go mad if you did. You just think about the colour on the top. But those colours are there, all the same. All the quarrels, and the bits of unkindness. And every so often something happens to put a chip right through; and then you can't not think of them.' She looked up, and grew self-conscious;

She said that; and I knew then that, careful as I have been—still and secret and silent as I have been, in my high room—she has been watching me, as Miss Ridley watches, and Miss Haxby.

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

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

You may say that, now Dawes has gone. You didn't think our locks so hard—nor our matrons, perhaps—when they kept her neat and close, for you to gaze at!

I could not want a lover, more than I want freedom.

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

She looked again at Julia's handsome, fragile figure and thought, What is it about Julia? Why is she always so alone?

And I made another curtsey, and winked.—Two curious things to do together, as it happened, and I would not recommend you try it: for I fear the wink unbalanced the curtsey; and I'm certain the curtsey threw off the wink.