Best 81 quotes of Sarah Waters on MyQuotes

All unwillingly I opened my eyes - then I opened them wider, and lifted my head. The heat, my weariness, were quite forgotten. Piercing the shadows of the naked stage was a single shaft of rosy limelight, and in the centre of this there was a girl: the most marvellous girl - I knew it at once! - that I had ever seen.

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 get another to replace her.

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 and have thought: “This is where the novel should actually start.” A huge amount of information about character and backstory can be conveyed through small detail. The emotional attachment you feel to a scene or a chapter will fade as you move on to other stories. Be business-like about it.

Even ashes are a part of your freedom.

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?

How will a person know, Selina, when the soul that has the affinity with hers is near it?" She answered, "She will know. Does she look for air, before she breathes it? This love will be guided to her; and when it comes, she will know. And she will do anything to keep that love about her, then. Because to lose it will be like a death to her.

I barely knew I had skin before I met you.

I felt that thread that had come between us, tugging, tugging at my heart - so hard, it hurt me. A hundred times I almost rose, almost went in to her; a hundred times I thought, Go to her! Why are you waiting? Go back to her side! But every time, I thought of what would happen if I did. I knew that I couldn't lie beside her, without wanting to touch her. I couldn't have felt her breath upon my mouth, without wanting to kiss her. And I couldn't have kissed her, without wanting to save her.

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.

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 a miserable kind of emblem; would anyway be there, on the surface of her body, rather than corroding it from within. Now the thought came to her again, that she might scar herself in some way. It came, like the solution to a problem: I won't be doing it like some hysterical girl. I won't be hoping she'll come catch me at it. It won't be like lying on the sitting-room floor. I'll be doing it for myself, as a secret.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I've just finished a series of Olivia Manning novels. She's best known for two trilogies: Balkan Trilogy and Levant Trilogy. The six novels are continuous and contain the same set of characters. They are based on Manning's experiences in Eastern Europe and Egypt during the Second World War. Each novel is a wonderful picture of the peculiar British expatriate culture and what was happening during the war. She's one of those brilliant women who write very well about domestic relationships. All the books are slim, and it's easy to gallop through them.

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

life is crap but, every day is an experience

.. now i begin to feel a longing so great, so sharp, i fear it will never be assuaged. i think it will mount, and mount, and make me mad, or kill me.

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.

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.

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 about what your minor characters' stories are, even though they may intersect only slightly with your protagonist's.

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.

The bad blood rose in me, just like wine.

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

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

We fitted together like the two halves of an oyster-shell. I was Narcissus, embracing the pond in which I was about to drown. However much we had to hide our love, however guarded we had to be about our pleasure, I could not long be miserable about a thing so very sweet. Nor, in my gladness, could I quite believe that anybody would be anything but happy for me if only they knew.

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.

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

Why is it we can never love the people we ought to?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

But it's the simple and the good that are meant to suffer in this world—ain't it, though!

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

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

But you cannot know the glimpses I have had, you cannot know there is another, dazzling place, that seems to welcome me! I have been led to it, Helen, by someone marvellous and strange. You won't know this. They will tell you of her, and they will make her seem squalid and ordinary, they will turn my passion into something gross and wrong. You will know, that it is neither of those things. It is only love, Helen - only that. I cannot live, and not be at her side!

Can't people do hurtful things, sometimes, and not even know they're doing them?

Don't panic. Midway through writing a novel, I have regularly experienced moments of bowel-curdling terror, as I contemplate the drivel on the screen before me and see beyond it, in quick succession, the derisive reviews, the friends' embarrassment, the failing career, the dwindling income, the repossessed house, the divorce . . . Working doggedly on through crises like these, however, has always got me there in the end. Leaving the desk for a while can help. Talking the problem through can help me recall what I was trying to achieve before I got stuck. Going for a long walk almost always gets me thinking about my manuscript in a slightly new way. And if all else fails, there's prayer. St Francis de Sales, the patron saint of writers, has often helped me out in a crisis. If you want to spread your net more widely, you could try appealing to Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, too.

Don't you be thinking,' she says, 'on things that are done and can't be changed. All right, dear girl? You think of the time to come.

Get over it. What a funny phrase that is! As if one’s grief is a fallen house, and one has to pick one’s way over the rubble to the ground on the other side…

Eppure, anche membra di cera devono cedere alla fine al calore delle mani che le muovono. Arriva una notte in cui, finalmente, mi arrendo alle sue.

Every poor lady that came to me, that touched my hand, that drew a small part of my spirit from me to her—they were only shadows. Aurora, they were shadows of you! I was only seeking you out, as you were seeking me. You were seeking me, your own affinity. And if you let them keep me from you now, I think we shall die!

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.

Funny how hard it is to keep talking, when someone asks you to start and not stop.

Her friend - and her partner on the stage. You will not believe me, but making love to Kitty - a thing done in passion, but always, too, in shadow and silence, and with an ear half-cocked for the sound of footsteps on the stairs - making love to Kitty and posing at her side in a shaft of limelight, before a thousand pairs of eyes, to a script I knew by heart, in an attitude I had laboured for hours to perfect - these things were not so very different. A double act is always twice the act that the audience thinks it; beyond our songs, our steps, our bits of business with coins and canes and flowers, there was a private language, in which we held an endless, delicate exchange of which the crowd knew nothing. This was a language not of the tongue but of the body, its vocabulary the pressure of a finger or a palm, the nudging of a hip, the holding or breaking of a gaze, that said, You are too slow - you got too fast - not there but here - that's good - that's better! It was as if we walked before the crimson curtain, lay down upon the boards and kissed and fondled - and were clapped, and cheered, and paid for it!

I felt that thread that had come between us, tugging, tugging at my heart—so hard, it hurt me.

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