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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Popular quotes

“That is who I want you to remember, lad. The man so filled with Arman's love that he could forgive his son for taking his life and the life of his bride. That is the man I knew. The king I served. Just you remember it.'
'But a man with many mistresses. A man who wouldn't have had that problem if he'd--'
'Aye, he was no porcelain saint. He was mixed, torn, pulled by light and darkness, as is every follower of Arman. That is what it is to know Arman and yet still live in this world. Pity those who do not know Arman, because in them there is nothing at all pulling them toward light.”
― Jill Williamson, quote from From Darkness Won


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― Carl Hiaasen, quote from Chomp


“The most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.”
― G.K. Chesterton, quote from The Man Who Was Thursday


“For me performing has a lot to do with being fearless.”
― Kim Gordon, quote from Girl in a Band


“If Steve Symms lost, it would turn the country over to liberals, to TEDDY KENNEDY!”
― Richard Ben Cramer, quote from What It Takes: The Way to the White House


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