The Little Stranger Quotes

“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, 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, The Little Stranger

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

“Can't people do hurtful things, sometimes, and not even know they're doing them?”
― Sarah Waters, 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, The Little Stranger

“The words used to drive me into secret rages, because on the one hand I wanted desperately to live up to my own reputation for cleverness, and on the other it seemed very unfair, that that cleverness, which I had never asked for, could be turned into something with which to cut me down.”
― Sarah Waters, 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, The Little Stranger

“Her eyes are like fingers. They can touch. They can press and pinch.”
― Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger

“You ought to know better, a clever lad like you,’ I expect she said. People were always saying things like that to me when I was young. My parents, my uncles, my schoolmasters—all the various adults who interested themselves in my career. The words used to drive me into secret rages, because on the one hand I wanted desperately to live up to my own reputation for cleverness, and on the other it seemed very unfair, that that cleverness, which I had never asked for, could be turned into something with which to cut me down.”
― Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger

“She had a vision of the work she had done on the house in the past few years, all the wooden floors and panels she had polished, all the glass, all the plate; and instead of resenting the fire for threatening to snatch these things from her, she wanted to give them all up in a sort of orgy of surrender.”
― Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger

“And perhaps there is a limit to the grieving that the human heart can do.”
― Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger

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

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

“It’s a queer thing, being plunged in and out of the dramas of one’s patients—especially at night.”
― Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger

“A family man never makes a good family doctor; he has too many worries of his own.”
― Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger

“Altogether, there was an air of health and easy power about her -- as if she could no more help being robust, I thought with a trace of admiration, than a beautiful woman could help good looks.”
― Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger

“I do love my children, Doctor; truly I do. But what a very dull and half-alive thing that love has seemed to me, sometimes! Because I have been half alive, you see”
― Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger

“I’ve stopped listening to the news; it’s too alarming. The world seems to be run by scientists and generals, all playing with bombs like so many schoolboys.”
― Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger

“I have been too busy for discontentment to have had a chance to set in. But I’ve had occasional dark hours, dreary fits when my life, laid all before me, has seemed bitter and hollow and insignificant as a bad nut;”
― Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger

“The truth is, you see, we know how lucky we are to have lived there at all. We have to sort of keep the place in order, keep up our side of the bargain. That can feel like an awful pressure, sometimes.”
― Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger

“But the fact is, my kindnesses were very small things; it was simply that the family lived in so isolated and precarious a way, they felt with extra force the impact of any chance nudge of fortune, good or bad.”
― Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger

“Only her face, I thought, betrayed the wretchedness of the past few weeks, for caught at certain angles it seemed heavier and plainer than ever—as if, with the loss of her dog, there had come something like the loss of the last of her optimism and her youth.”
― Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger

“She was my one true love. Does that sound odd to you? I never expected, when I was young, that I should fall in love with my own child, but she and I were like sweethearts. When she died, I felt for a long time that I might as well have died with her. Perhaps I did”
― Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger

“You think I should repay you, by marrying you? Is that what you think marriage is—a kind of payment?”
― Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger

“Yes, I’ve often thought it must be exhausting to be a woman. ’ ‘It is, if you do it properly. Which is why I so seldom do.”
― Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger

“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, The Little Stranger

“I can never decide if it’s reassuring when people turn out to be just what one’s expected, or depressing”
― Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger

“You keep on saying that!’ ‘Well, unfortunately it keeps on being true!”
― Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger

“There are things that have happened, over at Hundreds, that I can’t explain. It’s as if the house is in the grip of some sort of miasma.”
― Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger

“because on the one hand I wanted desperately to live up to my own reputation for cleverness, and on the other it seemed very unfair, that that cleverness, which I had never asked for, could be turned into something with which to cut me down.”
― Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger