Sarah Waters Quotes

37 quotes in 680 categories

• There is no patience so terrible as that of the deranged.
• 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…
• For was that all, she thought bleakly, that love ever was? Something that saved one from loneliness? A sort of insurance policy against not counting?
• I barely knew I had skin before I met you.
• Read like mad. But try to do it analytically - which can be hard, because the better and more compelling a novel is, the less…
• 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…
• 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…
• She supposed that houses, after all - like the lives that were lived in them - were mostly made of space. It was the spaces,…
• All unwillingly I opened my eyes - then I opened them wider, and lifted my head. The heat, my weariness, were quite forgotten. Piercing the…
• And perhaps there is a limit to the grieving that the human heart can do. As when one adds salt to a tumbler of water,…
• Why do gentlemen's voices carry so clearly, when women's are so easily stifled?
• It's a curious, wanting thing.
• I suppose I really seemed mad, then; but it was only through the awfulness of having said nothing but the truth, and being thought to…
• 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…
• I knew that I couldn't lie beside her, without wanting to touch her. I couldn't have felt her breath come upon my mouth, without wanting…
• Being in love, you know... it's not like having a canary, in a cage. When you lose one sweetheart, you can't just go out and…
• Why is it we can never love the people we ought to?
• I felt that thread that had come between us, tugging, tugging at my heart - so hard, it hurt me. A hundred times I almost…
• What does it say?" I said, when I had. She said, "It is filled with all the words for how I want you...Look.
• Weep all the artful tears you like. You shall never make my hard heart the softer.

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