Sarah Waters Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

life is crap but, every day is an experience

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

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.

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.

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.

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