Sarah Waters citations

“I barely knew I had skin before I met you.”

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

“It's a curious, wanting thing.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“.. this feeling haunts and inhabits me, like a sickness. it covers me, like skin.”

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

“Even ashes are a part of your freedom.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“life is crap but, every day is an experience”

“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.”