Quotes from The Little Stranger

Sarah Waters ·  466 pages

Rating: (31.1K votes)


“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, quote from The Little Stranger


“I seem to have been cross, somehow, all the time when I was a girl. I was horrid... You're supposed to grow out of horridness, aren't you? I don't think I ever grew out of mine. Sometimes I think it's still inside me, like something nasty I swallowed that got stuck.”
― Sarah Waters, quote from The Little Stranger


“We see what a punishing business it is, simply being alive.”
― Sarah Waters, quote from The Little Stranger


“Yes, Emily Dickenson -- a rather exhausting poet, now I come to think of it. All that breathlessness and skipping about. What's wrong with nice, long lines and a jaunty rhythm?”
― Sarah Waters, quote from The Little Stranger


“The subliminal mind has many dark, unhappy corners, after all. Imagine something loosening itself from one of those corners. Let's call it a---a germ. And let's say conditions prove right for that germ to develop---to grow, like a child in the womb. What would this little stranger grow into? A sort of shadow-self, perhaps: a Caliban, a Mr Hyde. A creature motivated by all the nasty impulses and hungers the conscious mind had hoped to keep hidden away: things like envy and malice and frustration...”
― Sarah Waters, quote from The Little Stranger



“modern dances always seem to me so vulgar. So much hopping about; like a scene from a mental ward!”
― Sarah Waters, quote from The Little Stranger


“I'm like a weather-vane, I start twitching when the wind's on the turn.”
― Sarah Waters, quote from The Little Stranger


“Her eyes were still closed, and in the darkness, in her dark dress and coat, she seemed an assemblage of angular fragments...”
― Sarah Waters, quote from The Little Stranger


“...I made what can only have been a few rather idiotic observations about the bricks.”
― Sarah Waters, quote from The Little Stranger


“...keeping their gimlet eyes on one's affairs...”
― Sarah Waters, quote from The Little Stranger



“He was just the sort of man to have faith in leeches. Leeches, and licorice, and cod-liver oil.”
― Sarah Waters, quote from The Little Stranger


About the author

Sarah Waters
Born place: in Neyland, Pembrokeshire, Wales, The United Kingdom
Born date July 21, 1966
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