Top 120 Sarah Winman Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “And there they left Cress to become a tree.”

— Sarah Winman

102. “You have to risk failure to become excellent.”

— Sarah Winman

103. “And when he looked over, his dad was dead and glowing on top of the bed. Glare from a street lamp had snuck in through the curtain and had lit up the old boy like some medieval saint.”

— Sarah Winman

104. “Peg could be kind, but there wasn’t enough of it be a regular thing with her. It was like a wage. Always ran out by Thursday.”

— Sarah Winman

105. “They’re secret because we don’t know what to do about the thing we were. So we stay away from it.”

— Sarah Winman

106. “You can stay that side and I’ll stay over here. And we won’t touch. We’ll just be company for one another, and company at any age is good.”

— Sarah Winman

107. “I thought this is how it would be if the sun died. The gentle shutting down of an organ; sleepy no longer working. No explosion at the end of life just the slow disintegration into darkness where life as we know it never wakes up because nothing reminds us that we have to.”

— Sarah Winman

108. “I had feet not fins, my father’s brow and my mother’s eyes. But, more importantly, I had my mother’s heart.”

— Sarah Winman

109. “He needed to know everyone was safe because without them he was nothing.”

— Sarah Winman

110. “Adventure, the best medicine.”

— Sarah Winman

111. “Really, though, it was about her touch and gaze, because when either fell on him, neither wanted to let him go.”

— Sarah Winman

112. “He thought they looked so happy, and he thought they were family, and he wanted to show that in the photograph. They were all that mattered.”

— Sarah Winman

113. “Eighteen months ago, the phone rang. Yes? I said. What now? I said. What – But there was silence. G? Silence. He began to cry. Talk to me, I said. Silence. I’ve got it, he said. It: the shorthand we all understood. I said I’d never leave his side.”

— Sarah Winman

114. “Stories, like nature, tend not to end, said Marvellous.”

— Sarah Winman

115. “I was transfixed by the possibility of imagination within this home, no matter how strange it appeared to be. This wasn’t the quiet symmetry of my everyday, the rows of terraced houses with their rectangular gardens and the routines as reliable as sturdy hairs. This wasn’t the world in which things matched, or even went with. This was a world devoid of harmony. This was a world of drama, where comedy and tragedy fought for space.”

— Sarah Winman

116. “Do I look as tipsy as I feel? No point asking me, dear, said Dotty, I’ve been talking to two of you for the last hour. Cheers, sweets.”

— Sarah Winman

117. “What was it about these roads that plunged him into a state of childlike anxiety? The light had virtually disappeared by the time he reached the front door, and a feeling of foreboding had taken hold.”

— Sarah Winman

118. “Unknown to me, she was the product of missionaries who had spent a lifetime preaching the Lord’s work in an inhospitable part of Africa, only to have found that the Muslims had got there first.”

— Sarah Winman

119. “I gasp. A hand down the back of my jeans has found my crack. A blast of poppers hits my nose and my heart thumps to the bass notes of desire.”

— Sarah Winman

120. “People knew as they lay alone at night that this was the beginning, the raw beginning that was to be their Present, their Now, their Future, their Memory.”

— Sarah Winman

121. “He jumped on the train with galoshes, a K-Way rain jacket and one change of clothing. He looked out from the ferry as England pulled away. He was going to Florence to save art. He was a sixties man through and through, and peace and love pulsed through his pulmonic and aortic valves. And he smiled wide now that his teeth were fixed.”

— Sarah Winman

122. “A moment of authenticity when fate and blueprint collide and everything is not only possible, but within arm’s reach.”

— Sarah Winman

123. “All the world’s a stage. And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits, and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.”

— Sarah Winman

124. “The perverse pull of the past drew him inside to the back room, virtually unaltered since the days of his youth.”

— Sarah Winman

125. “He said that he’d read everything about swimming, firmly believing he could trip across words, like stepping-stones, to the bank of experience.”

— Sarah Winman

126. “We were an unconventional family. Scandal was a rite of passage.”

— Sarah Winman

127. “Fear was catching. Even the immune were suffering.”

— Sarah Winman

128. “These people just don’t know how to be English, Mrs Wright. But they’re not English, said Mabel, and you said the same about the Welsh twenty years ago. Good day to you, Mrs Copsey. Careful of the flies!”

— Sarah Winman

129. “But what it’s always about for me is response. It’s a painting that demands of us the response. All the best ones do.”

— Sarah Winman