Sarah Waters Quotes

And yet, I seemed to feel my eyes bound, too, with bands of silk. And at my throat there was a velvet collar. ~ Sarah Waters

It was as though their life, thought Frances, were being mercilessly spooled back on to a reel; or as if, one by one, the stitches that had fastened them together were being unpicked. ~ Sarah Waters

Did she remember, how we laughed and blushed? 'Pa used to say your face was like the red heart on a playing card
mine, he said, was like the diamond. Do you remember, Helen, how Pa said that? ~ Sarah Waters

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. ~ Sarah Waters

As far as Frances was concerned, gardening was simply open-air housework. ~ Sarah Waters

For she was the only one, of all of them, to have spared me a pleasant word; and suddenly I longed for time to pass, not for its own sake, but as it would take me back to her. ~ Sarah Waters

Oh, for shame! Nancy, have you never seen Florrie's face in a chrysanthemum, or a rose?'
'Never.' I said. 'Though there was a flounder for sale on a fishmonger's barrow, in Whitechapel yesterday, and the likeness was quite uncanny. I very nearly brought it home ... ~ Sarah Waters

She scissored the curls away, and - toms, grow easily sentimental over their haircuts, but I remember this sensation very vividly - it was not like she was cutting hair, it was as if I had a pair of wings beneath my shoulder-blades, that the flesh had all grown over, and she was slicing free ... ~ Sarah Waters

She rose from her bed full of new resolutions. 'We must get out and about more,' she told her startled mother. 'We must try different things. We are getting groovy.' She drew up a list of events and activities: concerts, day trips, public meetings. She went in a fit through her address book, writing letters to old friends. She borrowed novels from the library by authors who had never interested her before. She began to teach herself Esperanto, reciting phrases as she polished and swept. ~ Sarah Waters

Novels are nothing but evolution, but there does come a point when that stops, and the story is sealed within the pages of the book. That doesn't happen with a play. Even performances are different every night. ~ Sarah Waters

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

We have a name for your disease. We call it a hyper-aesthetic one. You have been encouraged to over-indulge yourself in literature; and have inflamed your organs of fancy. ~ Sarah Waters

No-one speaks. No-one moves ( ... ). We glide, softly, in silence, into our dark and separate hells ~ Sarah Waters

My story is the story of many postwar British families. Upward mobility. A council house and then new affluence. ~ Sarah Waters

Words, hmm? They seduce us in darkness, and the mind clothes and fashions them to fashions of its own. ~ Sarah Waters

Ours is a world which feels so unsettled and dangerous in large ways, whether it's terrorism or global financial meltdown or climate change - huge things that affect us deeply, and yet things about which we can do, individually, very little. ~ Sarah Waters

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

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

I barely knew I had skin before I met you. ~ Sarah Waters

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. ~ Sarah Waters

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

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

I don't want to understand you,' I say tiredly. 'I wish you would not speak at all. ~ Sarah Waters

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. ~ Sarah Waters

I'm taking you out, to meet my friends. I'm taking you,' she put a hand to my cheek, 'to my club. ~ Sarah Waters

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. ~ Sarah Waters

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 ~ Sarah Waters

It proved difficult, when it came to it, to part from her mother with a bright goodbye
though, after all, not that difficult, because this was only the beginning, and there were still two or three more goodbyes to come. For the same reason, as she made the walk down to Camberwell and along the Walworth Road, though she tried to gaze at everything in the knowledge that she might soon be taken away from it, she couldn't keep it up, she felt mannered and inauthentic
like an actress, she thought, playing a character to whom the doctor had just delivered the fatal diagnosis. ~ Sarah Waters

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. ~ Sarah Waters

I had a very clear vision, of Selina with her hair about her shoulders, a crimson hat upon her head, a velvet coat, ice-skates - I must have been remembering some picture. I imagined myself beside her, the air coming sharply into our mouths. I imagined how it would be if I took her, not to Italy, but only to Marishes, to my sister's house; if I sat with her at supper, and shared her room, and kissed her -
I cannot say what would frighten them most - her being a spirit-medium, or a convict, or a girl. ~ Sarah Waters

My parents were the first in our family to go to grammar school. My grandparents were in service. ~ Sarah Waters

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

And, worst of all, she was trapped with their marriage, their mystifying union, which had evidently passed out of whatever affectionate phase it had recently enjoyed and was already mired in some new quarrel . . . She didn't care about the details. ~ Sarah Waters

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 ... ~ Sarah Waters

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

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

Respect your characters, even the ­minor ones. In art, as in life, everyone is the hero of their own particular story; it is worth thinking about what your minor characters' stories are, even though they may intersect only slightly with your protagonist's. ~ Sarah Waters

There was a prisoner, I said, in the first cell of the second passage. A fair-haired girl, quite young, quite handsome. What did Miss Craven know of her? The matron's face had grown sour when talking of Cook. Now it grew sour again. 'Selina Dawes,' she said. 'A queer one. Keeps her eyes and her mind to herself
that's all I know. I've heard her called the easiest prisoner in the gaol. They say she has never given an hour's trouble since she was brought here. Deep, I call her.' Deep? 'As the ocean. ~ Sarah Waters

I was mad about the theatre growing up, really mad. We had a local theatre, the Torch, and I used to usher there. I would see the shows over and over again. ~ Sarah Waters

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. ~ Sarah Waters

Don't panic. Midway through writing a novel, I have regularly experienced moments of bowel-curdling terror, as I contemplate the drivel on the screen before me and see beyond it, in quick succession, the derisive reviews, the friends' embarrassment, the failing career, the dwindling income, the repossessed house, the divorce ... Working doggedly on through crises like these, however, has always got me there in the end. Leaving the desk for a while can help. Talking the problem through can help me recall what I was trying to achieve before I got stuck. Going for a long walk almost always gets me thinking about my manuscript in a slightly new way. And if all else fails, there's prayer. St Francis de Sales, the patron saint of writers, has often helped me out in a crisis. If you want to spread your net more widely, you could try appealing to Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, too. ~ Sarah Waters

Why do gentlemen's voices carry so clearly, when women's are so easily stifled? ~ Sarah Waters

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. ~ Sarah Waters

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. ~ Sarah Waters

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. ~ Sarah Waters

I'll burn myself, or I'll cut myself. For a burn or a cut might be shown, might be nursed, might scar or heal, would be a miserable kind of emblem; would anyway be there, on the surface of her body, rather than corroding it from within. Now the thought came to her again, that she might scar herself in some way. It came, like the solution to a problem: I won't be doing it like some hysterical girl. I won't be hoping she'll come catch me at it. It won't be like lying on the sitting-room floor. I'll be doing it for myself, as a secret. ~ Sarah Waters

Treat writing as a job. Be disciplined. Lots of writers get a bit OCD-ish about this. Graham Greene famously wrote 500 words a day. Jean Plaidy managed 5,000 before lunch, then spent the afternoon answering fan mail. My minimum is 1,000 words a day – which is sometimes easy to achieve, and is sometimes, frankly, like shitting a brick, but I will make myself stay at my desk until I've got there, because I know that by doing that I am inching the book forward. Those 1,000 words might well be rubbish–they often are. But then, it is always easier to return to rubbish words at a later date and make them better. ~ Sarah Waters

I've never managed to get very far with Henry James. ~ Sarah Waters

I've just finished a series of Olivia Manning novels. She's best known for two trilogies: Balkan Trilogy and Levant Trilogy. The six novels are continuous and contain the same set of characters. They are based on Manning's experiences in Eastern Europe and Egypt during the Second World War. Each novel is a wonderful picture of the peculiar British expatriate culture and what was happening during the war. She's one of those brilliant women who write very well about domestic relationships. All the books are slim, and it's easy to gallop through them. ~ Sarah Waters

You have brought your own ideas with you into the gaol,' Miss Haxby said, after a moment. 'But our ways at Millbank - as you can see - are rather narrow ones. ~ Sarah Waters

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. ~ Sarah Waters

There were about thirty of them, I think - all women; all seated at tables, bearing drinks and books and papers. You might have passed any one of them upon the street, and thought nothing; but the effect of their appearance all combined was rather queer. They were dressed, not strangely, but somehow distinctly. They wore skirts - but the kind of skirts a tailor might design if he were set, for a dare, to sew a bustle for a gent. Many seemed clad in walking-suits or riding-habits. Many wore pince-nez, or carried monocles on ribbons. There were one or two rather startling coiffures; and there were more neckties than I had ever seen brought together at any exclusively female ensemble. ~ Sarah Waters

She raised her head when she heard my step, and her gaze met my own, over the matron's dipping shoulder, and her eyes grew bright. I knew then how hard it had been to keep, not just from Millbank but from her. I felt that little quickening. It was just as I imagine a woman must feel, when the baby within her gives its first kick.
Does it matter if I feel that, that is so small, and silent, and secret? ~ Sarah Waters

Weep all the artful tears you like. You shall never make my hard heart the softer. ~ Sarah Waters

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. ~ Sarah Waters

I do love the past but wouldn't want to live in it. ~ Sarah Waters

His feeling haunts and inhabits me, like a sickness. it covers me, like skin. ~ Sarah Waters

One time, two years ago, I took a draught of morphia, meaning to end my life. My mother found me before the life was ended, the doctor drew the poison from my stomach with a syringe, and when I woke, it was to the sound of my own weeping. For I had hoped to open my eyes on Heaven, where my father was; and they had only pulled me back to Hell. ~ Sarah Waters

There is no patience so terrible as that of the deranged. ~ Sarah Waters

There was, of course, the dildo that I have described (though the device, or the instrument, was what I learned, following Diana, to call it: I think the unnecessary euphemism, with its particular odour of the surgery or house of correction, appealed to her; only when really heated would she call the thing by its proper name - and even then she was as likely to ask for Monsieur Dildo, or simply Monsieur). Besides this there was an album of photographs of big-buttocked girls with hairless parts, bearing feathers; also a collection of erotic pamphlets and novels, all hymning the delights of what I would call tommistry but what they, like Diana, called Sapphic Passion. ~ Sarah Waters

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

Well, that was the clerk class for you. They might be completely without culture, but they certainly knew how to make themselves comfortable. ~ Sarah Waters

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. It's like I am filling up, like a wine-glass when it's filled with wine. I watch the acts before her and they are like nothing - they're like dust. Then she walks on the stage and - she is so pretty; and her suit is so nice; and her voice is so sweet… She makes me want to smile and weep, at once. She makes me sore, here." I placed a hand upon my chest, upon the breast-bone. "I never saw a girl like her before. I never knew that there were girls like her…" My voice became a trembling whisper then, and I found that I could say no more. There was another silence. I opened my eyes and looked at Alice - and knew at once that I shouldn't have spoken; that I should have been as dumb and as cunning with her as with the rest of them. There was a look on her face - it was not ambiguous at all now - a look of mingled shock, and nervousness, and embarrassment or shame. I had said too much. I felt as if my admiration for Kitty Butler had lit a beacon inside me, and opening my unguarded mouth had sent a shaft of light into the darkened room, illuminating all. I had said too much - but it was that, or say nothing. ~ Sarah Waters

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

I love research. Sometimes I think writing novels is just an excuse to allow myself this leisurely time of getting to know a period and reading its books and watching its films. I see it as a real treat. ~ Sarah Waters

It was heavy, and I staggered when I lifted it; but it was strangely satifying to have a real burden upon my shoulders – a kind of counterweight to my terrible heaviness of heart. ~ Sarah Waters

She ran, and leaned to the wall, until her face was close to mine and her breath came on me.
I said, 'I'll do it. I'll go with you. I love you, and I cannot give you up. Only tell me what I must do and I will do it!'
Then I saw her eye, and it was black, and my own face swam in it, pale as a pearl. And then, it was like Pa and the looking-glass. My soul left me - I felt it fly from me and lodge in her. ~ Sarah Waters

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

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

Why is it we can never love the people we ought to? ~ Sarah Waters

She wore a boiled shirt and a bow-tie, and her hair, though long and bound, was sleek with oil. She was about two- or three-and-thirty, and her waist was thick; but her upper lip, at least, was dark as a boy's. They would have called her terribly handsome, I guessed, in about 1880. ~ Sarah Waters

I would go down to the kitchen, saying 'How do you do?' to whoever I met there: ... 'How are you, Mrs. Cakebread?' (That was the cook: that really was her name, it wasn't a joke and no-one laughed it it.) ~ Sarah Waters

I am too weary.
For oh, I am so terribly weary at last! I think, in all of London, there is no-one and nothing so weary as I - unless perhaps the river, which flows beneath the frigid sky, through its accustomed courses, to the sea. How deep, how black, how thick the water seems to-night! How soft its surface seems to lie. How chill its depths must be. ~ Sarah Waters

But words, Hawtrey, words - hmm? They seduce us in darkness, and the mind clothes and fleshes them to fashions of its own. ~ Sarah Waters

Even ashes are a part of your freedom. ~ Sarah Waters

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. ~ Sarah Waters

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. ~ Sarah Waters

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. ~ Sarah Waters

Every poor lady that came to me, that touched my hand, that drew a small part of my spirit from me to her - they were only shadows. Aurora, they were shadows of you! I was only seeking you out, as you were seeking me. You were seeking me, your own affinity. And if you let them keep me from you now, I think we shall die! ~ Sarah Waters

The early '20s were like the waist of an hourglass. Lots of things were hurtling toward it and squeezing through it and then hurtling out the other side. ~ Sarah Waters

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

rooms seemed changed. I took to ~ Sarah Waters

But you cannot know the glimpses I have had, you cannot know there is another, dazzling place, that seems to welcome me! I have been led to it, Helen, by someone marvellous and strange. You won't know this. They will tell you of her, and they will make her seem squalid and ordinary, they will turn my passion into something gross and wrong. You will know, that it is neither of those things. It is only love, Helen - only that.
I cannot live, and not be at her side! ~ Sarah Waters

She sang that night like - I cannot say like an angel, for her songs were all of champagne suppers and strolling in the Burlington Arcade; perhaps, then, like a fallen angel - or yet again like a falling one: she sang like a falling angel might sing with the bounds of heaven fresh burst behind him, and hell still distant and unguessed. And as she did so, I sang with her - not loudly and carelessly like the rest of the crowd, but softly, almost secretly, as if she might hear me the better if I whispered rather than bawled. ~ Sarah Waters

I used to hate flying. I would sit there, rigid, convinced that if I relaxed, the plane would drop out of the sky. ~ Sarah Waters

And for a moment I though I would tell her, that it would be the easiest and the slightest thing imaginable- that after all, if anyone would understand it, she would. That I need only say, 'I am in love, Helen! I am in love! There is a girl so rare and marvelous and strange, and- Helen, she has all my life in her! ~ Sarah Waters

Sometimes I think I'd be perfectly happy to go on rewriting 'Tipping the Velvet' forever because it was so much fun. ~ Sarah Waters

She worked briskly and efficiently, taking her brush and pan from the drawing-room to the top of the stairs and making her way back down, a step at a time; after that she filled a bucket with water, fetched her kneeling-mat, and began to wash the hall floor. Vinegar was all she used. Soap left streaks on the black tiles. The first, wet rub was important for loosening the dirt, but it was the second bit that really counted, passing the wrung cloth over the floor in one supple, unbroken movement ... There! How pleasing each glossy tile was. 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. There was no point dwelling on the scuffs. ~ Sarah Waters

Everyone's so narrow and mean and
'
'No. Only a few people are. But the rest of us
don't you see? The rest of us become narrow and mean when we live falsely ... ~ Sarah Waters

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

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. ~ Sarah Waters

The day had begun to feel tinny: a pretend day, a dream day, that for some unaccountable reason she had to go on and on with as if it were real. ~ Sarah Waters

Altogether, there was an air of health and easy power about her -- as if she could no more help being robust, I thought with a trace of admiration, than a beautiful woman could help good looks. ~ Sarah Waters

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. That ~ Sarah Waters

But lurid touches were everywhere, she saw with dismay. It was as if a giant mouth had sucked a bag of boiled sweets and then given the house a lick. ~ Sarah Waters

Cut like crazy. Less is more. I've often read manuscripts - including my own - where I've got to the beginning of, say, chapter two and have thought: "This is where the novel should actually start." A huge amount of information about character and backstory can be conveyed through small detail. The emotional attachment you feel to a scene or a chapter will fade as you move on to other stories. Be business-like about it. ~ Sarah Waters

My spirit does not love yours - it is entwined with it. Our flesh does not love: our flesh is the same, and longs to leap to itself. It must do that, or wither! ~ Sarah Waters

Some things are so frightful that a bit of madness is the only sane response. You know that, don't you? ~ Sarah Waters

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

I wouldn't mind being a fly on the wall in a few Victorian parlours. ~ Sarah Waters