{"author":"Sarah Waters","author_id":"Sarah+Waters","total_quotes":37,"quotes":[{"text":"Marriages are like pianos. They go in and out of tune.","author":"Sarah Waters","tags":["marriage"],"id":5368,"author_id":"Sarah+Waters"},{"text":"She was about to be married, and was frightened to death. And no-one would love her, ever again.","author":"Sarah Waters","tags":["lgbt"],"id":15596,"author_id":"Sarah+Waters"},{"text":"She closed her eyes and let the rain fall on her face, and after another second, I could not have said what were raindrops, and what tears.","author":"Sarah Waters","tags":["life","romance","sadness"],"id":18385,"author_id":"Sarah+Waters"},{"text":"One time, two years ago, I took a draught of morphia, meaning to end my life. My mother found me before the life was ended, the doctor drew the poison from my stomach with a syringe, and when I woke, it was to the sound of my own weeping. For I had hoped to open my eyes on Heaven, where my father was; and they had only pulled me back to Hell.","author":"Sarah Waters","tags":["death","heaven","hell","life","suicide"],"id":24452,"author_id":"Sarah+Waters"},{"text":"I felt that thread that had come between us, tugging, tugging at my heart—so hard, it hurt me.","author":"Sarah Waters","tags":["feelings","fingersmith","heart","hurt","love","lust","sarah-waters","thread","tugging","want","wanting"],"id":35547,"author_id":"Sarah+Waters"},{"text":"But, here was a curious thing. The more I tried to give up thinking of her, the more I said to myself, 'She's nothing to you', the harder I tried to pluck the idea of her out of my heart, the more she stayed there.","author":"Sarah Waters","tags":["heart","love","stay","unrequited-love"],"id":36725,"author_id":"Sarah+Waters"},{"text":"I had loved Kitty -I would always love Kitty. But I had lived with her a kind of queer half-life, hiding from my own true self. Since then I had refused to love at all, had become - or so I thought - a creature beyond passion, driving others to their secret, humiliating confessions of lust; but never offering my own.","author":"Sarah Waters","tags":["love","secrets"],"id":44892,"author_id":"Sarah+Waters"},{"text":"For she was the only one, of all of them, to have spared me a pleasant word; and suddenly I longed for time to pass, not for its own sake, but as it would take me back to her.","author":"Sarah Waters","tags":["feelings","life","pleasant","time","words"],"id":50927,"author_id":"Sarah+Waters"},{"text":"Don't you be thinking,' she says, 'on things that are done and can't be changed. All right, dear girl? You think of the time to come.","author":"Sarah Waters","tags":["fingersmith","future","inspirational","past","present","sarah-waters","thoughts","time"],"id":53659,"author_id":"Sarah+Waters"},{"text":"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!","author":"Sarah Waters","tags":["acting","gay","lesbian","queer"],"id":82977,"author_id":"Sarah+Waters"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":37,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}