Top 100 Sarah Waters Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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, there comes a point where simply no more will be absorbed.”

— Sarah Waters

2. “Don’t you like surprises?’ No, Frances didn’t like surprises. She hated the thought of people plotting and planning on her behalf. She loathed the burden of being delighted once the surprise was disclosed.”

— Sarah Waters

3. “The bad blood rose in me, just like wine.”

— Sarah Waters

4. “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

5. “Your twisting is done – you have the last thread of my heart. I wonder: when the thread grows slack, will you feel it?”

— Sarah Waters

6. “I barely knew I had skin before I met you.”

— Sarah Waters

7. “Why is it we can never love the people we ought to?”

— Sarah Waters

8. “Even ashes are a part of your freedom.”

— Sarah Waters

9. “A girl, like you – ’ ‘Like me? There are no girls like me.’ I.”

— Sarah Waters

10. “But the more I think it, the more I want her, the more my desire rises and swells.”

— Sarah Waters

11. “Marriages are like pianos. They go in and out of tune.”

— Sarah Waters

12. “And perhaps there is a limit to the grieving that the human heart can do.”

— Sarah Waters

13. “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

14. “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 to kiss her. And I couldn’t have kissed her, without wanting to save her.”

— Sarah Waters

15. “Why do gentlemen’s voices carry so clearly, when women’s are so easily stifled?”

— Sarah Waters

16. “It’s a curious, wanting thing.”

— Sarah Waters

17. “Her eyes are like fingers. They can touch. They can press and pinch.”

— Sarah Waters

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

— Sarah Waters

19. “Ours is a world which feels so unsettled and dangerous in large ways, whether its 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

20. “Some things are so frightful that a bit of madness is the only sane response. You know that, don’t you?”

— Sarah Waters

21. “We see what a punishing business it is, simply being alive.”

— Sarah Waters

22. “I felt that thread that had come between us, tugging, tugging at my heart – so hard, it hurt me.”

— Sarah Waters

23. “As far as Frances was concerned, gardening was simply open-air housework.”

— Sarah Waters

24. “She will laugh. The sound is as strange, at Briar, as I imagine it must be in a prison or a church. Sometimes, she will sing. Once we talk of dancing. She rises and lifts her skirt, to show me a step. Then she pulls me to my feet, and turns and turns me; and I feel, where she presses against me, the quickening beat of her heart – I feel it pass from her to me and become mine.”

— Sarah Waters

25. “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?”

— Sarah Waters

26. “But words, Hawtrey, words – hmm? They seduce us in darkness, and the mind clothes and fleshes them to fashions of its own.”

— Sarah Waters

27. “But, here was a curious thing. The more I tried to give up thinking of her, the more I said to myself, ‘She’s nothing to you’, the harder I tried to pluck the idea of her out of my heart, the more she stayed there.”

— Sarah Waters

28. “Undressing myself had no fun in it, now I had undressed her.”

— Sarah Waters

29. “Can’t people do hurtful things, sometimes, and not even know they’re doing them?”

— Sarah Waters

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

— Sarah Waters

31. “Everybody in my world knew that regular work was only another name for being robbed and dying of boredom.”

— Sarah Waters

32. “With every step I took away from her, the movement at my heart and between my legs grew more defined: I felt like a ventriloquist, locking his protesting dolls in to a trunk.”

— Sarah Waters

33. “A family man never makes a good family doctor; he has too many worries of his own.”

— Sarah Waters

34. “The words used to drive me into secret rages, because on the one hand I wanted desperately to live up to my own reputation for cleverness, and on the other it seemed very unfair, that that cleverness, which I had never asked for, could be turned into something with which to cut me down.”

— Sarah Waters

35. “The best thing to do was to brazen it out, throw your head back, walk with a swagger, make a ‘character’ of yourself. It was tiring, sometimes, when you hadn’t the energy for it; that’s all.”

— Sarah Waters

36. “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;.”

— Sarah Waters

37. “He would be cruel indeed, to put a passion in her, and then to punish her for feeling it.”

— Sarah Waters

38. “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

39. “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

40. “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 be deluded.”

— Sarah Waters

41. “I’m sorry you aren’t as brave as you thought you were. But don’t punish me because of it.”

— Sarah Waters

42. “I might be weary or stupid; I might be nauseous with drink; I might be sore, at the hips, with the ache of my monthlies, but the opening of this box, as I have said, never ceased to stir me – I was like a dog twitching and slavering to hear his mistress call out Bone!”

— Sarah Waters

43. “It was odd to see her stepping out of that gloomy place, like a pearl coming out of an oyster.”

— Sarah Waters

44. “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

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

— Sarah Waters

46. “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 one.”

— Sarah Waters

47. “The fitful sleeping makes the hours pass slowly; it seems to me the night has many nights in it – has years of nights! – through which, as if through drifts of smoke, I am compelled to stumble.”

— Sarah Waters

48. “I never expected my books to do even as well as they have. I still feel grateful for it, every single day.”

— Sarah Waters

49. “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

50. “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