Sarah Waters Quotes
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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.
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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.
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Why is it we can never love the people we ought to?
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I wouldnt mind being a fly on the wall in a few Victorian parlours.
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There is no patience so terrible as that of the deranged.
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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?
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Your twisting is done – you have the last thread of my heart. I wonder: when the thread grows slack, will you feel it?
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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.
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..this feeling haunts and inhabits me, like a sickness. it covers me, like skin.
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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.
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It's a curious, wanting thing.
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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.
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.. 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.
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I never expected my books to do even as well as they have. I still feel grateful for it, every single day.