Sarah Waters
Sarah Waters
Sarah Watersis a Welsh novelist. She is best known for her novels set in Victorian society and featuring lesbian protagonists, such as Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith...
NationalityWelsh
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth21 July 1966
girl lying cutting
I'll burn myself, or I'll cut myself. For a burn or a cut might be shown, might be nursed, might scar or heal, would be a miserable kind of emblem; would anyway be there, on the surface of her body, rather than corroding it from within. Now the thought came to her again, that she might scar herself in some way. It came, like the solution to a problem: I won't be doing it like some hysterical girl. I won't be hoping she'll come catch me at it. It won't be like lying on the sitting-room floor. I'll be doing it for myself, as a secret.
ashes your-freedom
Even ashes are a part of your freedom.
writing mad trying
Read like mad. But try to do it analytically - which can be hard, because the better and more compelling a novel is, the less conscious you will be of its devices. It's worth trying to figure those devices out, however: they might come in useful in your own work.
sweet believe oysters
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.
cutting hair wings
She scissored the curls away, and - toms, grow easily sentimental over their haircuts, but I remember this sensation very vividly - it was not like she was cutting hair, it was as if I had a pair of wings beneath my shoulder-blades, that the flesh had all grown over, and she was slicing free...
voice gentleman
Why do gentlemen's voices carry so clearly, when women's are so easily stifled?
lust curious
It's a curious, wanting thing.
mad said nothing-but-the-truth
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.
people ought
Why is it we can never love the people we ought to?
wine blood rose
The bad blood rose in me, just like wine.
hate sky flying
I used to hate flying. I would sit there, rigid, convinced that if I relaxed, the plane would drop out of the sky.
world littles way
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.
wall mind victorian
I wouldnt mind being a fly on the wall in a few Victorian parlours.
novelists academic rate
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.