Top 100 Sarah Waters Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “She will be like everyone, putting on the things she sees the constructions she expects to find there.”

— Sarah Waters

52. “Yes, Emily Dickenson – a rather exhausting poet, now I come to think of it. All that breathlessness and skipping about. What’s wrong with nice, long lines and a jaunty rhythm?”

— Sarah Waters

53. “Read like mad. But try to do it analytically – which can be hard, because the better and more compelling a novel is, the less conscious you will be of its devices. It’s worth trying to figure those devices out, however: they might come in useful in your own work.”

— Sarah Waters

54. “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

55. “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

56. “I could not want a lover, more than I want freedom.”

— Sarah Waters

57. “She was at her truest, it seemed to her, in these tingling moments – these moments when, paradoxically, she was also at her most anonymous.”

— Sarah Waters

58. “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

59. “I wouldnt mind being a fly on the wall in a few Victorian parlours.”

— Sarah Waters

60. “In short, Nance, even was you going to the very devil himself, your mother and I would rather see you fly from us in joy, than stay with us in sorrow – and grow, maybe, to hate us, for keeping you from your fate.”

— Sarah Waters

61. “I knew that Kitty and I felt just the same- only, of course, about different things. I should have remembered this, later.”

— Sarah Waters

62. “It was only later that I wondered about it and tried to look back. But by then I could only see that there was once a time when we had walked apart; and then a time when we walked together.”

— Sarah Waters

63. “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.”

— Sarah Waters

64. “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

65. “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

66. “They had been patient, all this time. They’d lived in darkness. They’d lived without salt, without scent. They’d fed themselves little scraps of pleasure, like pairings of cheese. Now she became aware if the minutes as they passed: she felt them, suddenly, for what they were, as fragments of her life, her youth, that were rushing away like so many drops of water, never to return.”

— Sarah Waters

67. “His throat bulges queerly, as men’s throats do: as if inviting the blow that will crush it.”

— Sarah Waters

68. “She supposed that houses, after all – like the lives that were lived in them – were mostly made of space. It was the spaces, in fact, which counted, rather than the bricks.”

— Sarah Waters

69. “I seem to have been cross, somehow, all the time when I was a girl. I was horrid... You’re supposed to grow out of horridness, aren’t you? I don’t think I ever grew out of mine. Sometimes I think it’s still inside me, like something nasty I swallowed that got stuck.”

— Sarah Waters

70. “They settled back into an embrace – as if it was nothing, as if it was easy; as if they weren’t two boys, in a prison, in a city being blown and shot to bits; as if it was the most natural thing in the world.”

— Sarah Waters

71. “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

72. “She let her head sink, until her brow met the varnished glass. 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. Whereas she and Julia –.”

— Sarah Waters

73. “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.”

— Sarah Waters

74. “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

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

— Sarah Waters

76. “There is no patience so terrible as that of the deranged.”

— Sarah Waters

77. “I give myself up to darkness; and wish I may never again be required to lift my head to the light.”

— Sarah Waters

78. “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

79. “Sometimes the shortest journeys take longest, don’t they?”

— Sarah Waters

80. “She said, ‘It is filled with all the words for how I want you.”

— Sarah Waters

81. “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

82. “She shook her head, and closed her eyes. I felt her weariness then, and with it, my own. I felt it dark and heavy upon me, darker and heavier than any drug they ever gave me – it seemed heavy as death. I looked at the bed. I have seemed to see our kisses there sometimes, I’ve seen them hanging in the curtains, like bats, ready to swoop. Now, I thought, I might jolt the post and they would only fall, and shatter, and turn to powder.”

— Sarah Waters

83. “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

84. “Kitty’s gone, Flo. Like Lilian. Believe me, there’s more chance of her coming back!’ I began to smile. ‘And if she does, you can go to her, and I won’t say a word. And if Kitty comes for me, you can do similar. And then, I suppose, we shall have our paradises – and will be able to wave to one another from our separate clouds. But till then – till then, Flo, can’t we go on kissing, and just be glad?”

— Sarah Waters

85. “But for now there was this, and it was enough, it was more than they could have hoped for: the two of them in their stone corner, their dark clothes bleeding into the dusk, lights being kindled across the city, and a few pale stars in the sky.”

— Sarah Waters

86. “I do love the past but wouldnt want to live in it.”

— Sarah Waters

87. “What did she want? Frances couldn’t tell. She wasn’t sure she cared any more. There had been too much dancing back and forth. The night had been over-stretched: it had lost its tension.”

— Sarah Waters

88. “It was like a cure, being with Lilian. It made one feel like a piece of wax being cradled in a soft, warm palm.”

— Sarah Waters

89. “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

90. “Was this, she thought, what happened when one made friends with a married woman? One automatically got the husband too? – like a crochet pattern, coming free with a magazine?”

— Sarah Waters

91. “You expect things to change, or people to change; but it’s silly, isn’t it? Because people and things don’t change. Not really. You just have to get used to them.”

— Sarah Waters

92. “She looked again at Julia’s handsome, fragile figure and thought, What is it about Julia? Why is she always so alone?”

— Sarah Waters

93. “She was about to be married, and was frightened to death. And no-one would love her, ever again.”

— Sarah Waters

94. “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.”

— Sarah Waters

95. “My soul left me – I felt it fly from me and lodge in her.”

— Sarah Waters

96. “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.”

— Sarah Waters

97. “You have come to Millbank, to look on women more wretched than yourself, in the hope that it will make you well again.”

— Sarah Waters

98. “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.”

— Sarah Waters

99. “You may say that, now Dawes has gone. You didn’t think our locks so hard – nor our matrons, perhaps – when they kept her neat and close, for you to gaze at!”

— Sarah Waters

100. “To forget words, common words, because your habits are so narrow you need only know a hundred hard phrases – stone, soup, comb, Bible, needle, dark, prisoner, walk, stand still, look sharp, look sharp!”

— Sarah Waters