180 Quotes by Sarah Waters

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.