Sarah Waters Quotes

Tricky was a plain-faced man with a very handsome voice - a voice like the sound of a clarinet, at once liquid and penetrating, and lovely to listen to.

And for a moment I though I would tell her, that it would be the easiest and the slightest thing imaginable- that after all, if anyone would understand it, she would. That I need only say, 'I am in love, Helen! I am in love! There is a girl so rare and marvelous and strange, and- Helen, she has all my life in her!

She was about to be married, and was frightened to death. And no-one would love her, ever again.

I shivered again, remembering. I put the tip of one finger to my tongue. It tasted sharp—like vinegar, like blood.Like money.

The vase was placed upon my desk, and there were orange-blossoms in it—orange-blossoms, in an English winter!

Her friend - and her partner on the stage. You will not believe me, but making love to Kitty - a thing done in passion, but always, too, in shadow and silence, and with an ear half-cocked for the sound of footsteps on the stairs - making love to Kitty and posing at her side in a shaft of limelight, before a thousand pairs of eyes, to a script I knew by heart, in an attitude I had laboured for hours to perfect - these things were not so very different. A double act is always twice the act that the audience thinks it; beyond our songs, our steps, our bits of business with coins and canes and flowers, there was a private language, in which we held an endless, delicate exchange of which the crowd knew nothing. This was a language not of the tongue but of the body, its vocabulary the pressure of a finger or a palm, the nudging of a hip, the holding or breaking of a gaze, that said, You are too slow - you got too fast - not there but here - that's good - that's better! It was as if we walked before the crimson curtain, lay down upon the boards and kissed and fondled - and were clapped, and cheered, and paid for it!

But my thoughts were more like poisons. I had so many, they made me sick.

Undressing myself had no fun in it, now I had undressed her.