Sarah Waters quotes

Sarah Waters is a British novelist renowned for her historical fiction, often set in Victorian England and featuring LGBTQ+ themes. Her works such as "Tipping the Velvet" and "Fingersmith" have been widely acclaimed and adapted for television. She is celebrated for her intricate plotting, rich characterizations, and exploration of identity and desire. Here are 31 of her quotes:

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.

Sarah Waters

It's a curious, wanting thing.

Sarah Waters

I wouldn't mind being a fly on the wall in a few Victorian parlours.

Sarah Waters

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.

Sarah Waters

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

Sarah Waters

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

Sarah Waters

Even ashes are a part of your freedom.

Sarah Waters

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

Sarah Waters

I barely knew I had skin before I met you.

Sarah Waters

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.

Sarah Waters

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

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.

Sarah Waters

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.

Sarah Waters

life is crap but, every day is an experience.

Sarah Waters

I knew that I couldn't lie beside her, without wanting to touch her. I couldn't have felt her breath come upon my mouth, without wanting to kiss her. And I couldn't have kissed her, without wanting to save her.

Sarah Waters

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

Sarah Waters

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.

Sarah Waters

I was encouraged to be imaginative and read, and it was a great childhood for a budding writer because I had the time and the freedom to go into a world of my own.

Sarah Waters

I've ended up feeling fonder of 'The Paying Guests' than of any of my other novels.

Sarah Waters

I like dramas because there's a big overlap between film and fiction, so I feel relatively qualified to talk about plot and characterisation and that sort of thing.

Sarah Waters

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

Sarah Waters

The best thing to do was to brazen it out, throw your head back, walk with a swagger...

Sarah Waters