Sarah Waters

I knew Id always be a second-rate academic, and I thought, Well, Id rather be a second-rate novelist or even a third-rate…

— Sarah Waters

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

— Sarah Waters

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

— Sarah Waters

..this feeling haunts and inhabits me, like a sickness. it covers me, like skin.

— 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

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

— Sarah Waters

My nan was a nursery maid. Most people weren't in big houses. They were maids of all work.

— Sarah Waters

I'm interested in stories that aren't getting told: it's where my interests lie.

— Sarah Waters

For was that all, she thought bleakly, that love ever was? Something that saved one from loneliness? A sort of insurance policy…

— Sarah Waters

.. now i begin to feel a longing so great, so sharp, i fear it will never be assuaged. i think it…

— Sarah Waters

She supposed that houses, after all - like the lives that were lived in them - were mostly made of space. It…

— 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…

— Sarah Waters

“...but when she saw me turn to her she reached and took my hand. She took it, not to be led by…

— Sarah Waters

When theatre works, it's like nothing else, and when it doesn't, which is often, it's excruciating. It's perhaps not so excruciating when…

— Sarah Waters

I like dramas because there's a big overlap between film and fiction, so I feel relatively qualified to talk about plot and…

— Sarah Waters

“The best thing to do was to brazen it out, throw your head back, walk with a swagger, make a 'character' of…

— Sarah Waters

We fitted together like the two halves of an oyster-shell. I was Narcissus, embracing the pond in which I was about to…

— Sarah Waters

“You're not sure? Look at your own fingers. Are you not sure, if they are yours? Look at any part of you…

— Sarah Waters

How will a person know, Selina, when the soul that has the affinity with hers is near it?" She answered, "She will…

— Sarah Waters

“There were about thirty of them, I think - all women; all seated at tables, bearing drinks and books and papers. You…

— Sarah Waters

“Helen opened her eyes and gazed into the luminous blue of the sky. Was it crazy, she wondered, to be as grateful…

— Sarah Waters

All unwillingly I opened my eyes - then I opened them wider, and lifted my head. The heat, my weariness, were quite…

— Sarah Waters

“[...] You're not in love with anyone, are you?' 'No,' said Kay. 'Someone's in love with me, as it happens. A grand…

— Sarah Waters

“And that was all it took. They smiled at each other across the table, and some sort of shift occurred between them.…

— Sarah Waters

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

— 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…

— Sarah Waters

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

— Sarah Waters

What does it say?" I said, when I had. She said, "It is filled with all the words for how I want…

— Sarah Waters

“Perhaps, however, it is the same with spinsters as with ghosts; and one has to be of their ranks in order to…

— Sarah Waters

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

— Sarah Waters

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

— Sarah Waters

It was a great childhood. We weren't especially wealthy or anything, but I felt I had a kind of safety and freedom.

— Sarah Waters

“The best thing to do was to brazen it out, throw your head back, walk with a swagger...”

— 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

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

— Sarah Waters

“clad not exactly as a boy but, rather confusingly, as the boy I would have been, had I been more of a…

— Sarah Waters

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

— 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

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

— Sarah Waters

“They would say my nerve had failed me. They would laugh in my face! I had a certain standing. I was the…

— Sarah Waters