Quotes from Sarah Waters

It looks like the house of Ali Baba! Or the Moulin Rouge! Or the Taj Mahal! If only she would decide on a country and have done with it. Is that what passes for modern décor?

He would start it, I think, at the gate of Millbank, the point that every visitor must pass when they arrive to make their tour of the gaols.

Now the world seemed to her to have become so complex that its problems defied solution. There was only a chaos of conflicts of interest; the whole thing filled her with a sense of futility.

She wished for a moment that they were all children again. It still seemed extraordinary to her, that everything had turned out the way it had.

But the words came from me, I seemed to feel the shape and taste of them as they left my mouth. I might have sat there and been sick upon the table—they could not have silenced me.

A book may be on any queer subject, but one can at least always be certain how to turn a page and read it.

But my thoughts were more like poisons. I had so many, they made me sick.

But Helen, Helen,' I said, 'if they expect it to be hard, why don't they change things, to allow it to be easier?

Tricky was a plain-faced man with a very handsome voice - a voice like the sound of a clarinet, at once liquid and penetrating, and lovely to listen to.

It was then she said I had grown cynical. I said, that I had always been cynical—she had only never called it that. She had said rather that I was brave. She had called me an original. She had seemed to admire me for it.

You believe that to be a medium you must hold your spirit aside to let another spirit come. That however, is not how it is. You must rather be a servant of the spirits, you must become a plastic instrument for the spirits' own hands. You must let your spirit be used, your prayer must be always May I be used.

He was just the sort of man to have faith in leeches. Leeches, and licorice, and cod-liver oil.

We are not here to help them, ma'am. We are here to punish them. There are too many good women who are poor or ill or hungry, for us to bother with the bad ones.

I thought that I could make my life into a book that had no life or love in it. . . . Now I can see that my heart has crept across these pages, after all.

La felicità è una cosa talmente fragile di questi tempi. E' come se non ce ne fosse abbastanza per tutti.

we will all fly to someone, we will all return to that piece of shining matter from which our souls were torn with another, two halves of the same. It may be that the husband your sister has now has that other soul, that has the affinity with her soul—I hope it is. But it may be the next man she takes, or it may be neither. It may be someone she would never think to look to on the earth, someone kept from her by some false boundary . . .

I'm like a weather-vane, I start twitching when the wind's on the turn.

Her eyes were still closed, and in the darkness, in her dark dress and coat, she seemed an assemblage of angular fragments...

You thought her a pigeon. Pigeon, my arse. That bitch knew everything. She had been in on it from the start.

neuralgia, so she had come along on her own. It was worth it, though. She

That week was a terrible one. I had got my own mind back, the house seemed crueller than ever, and I saw how far I had sunk before in growing used to it.

He had the organ on a set of pram wheels; it appeared to be held together with string. Its sound was so raw and almost discordant that the music seemed not so much to be rising from the box as tumbling out of it, as if the notes were physical things of glass or metal, landing clanging at the man's feet.

keeping their gimlet eyes on one's affairs...

I sleep, and dream I am moving, swiftly, in a high-prowed boat, upon a dark and silent water.