The Paying Guests
Sarah Waters
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Some things are so frightful that a bit of madness is the only sane response. You know that, don’t you?”
“She loved these walks through London. She seemed, as she made them, to become porous, to soak in detail after detail; or else, like a battery to become charged. Yes, that was it, she thought, as she turned a corner: it wasn't a liquid creeping, it was a tingle, something electric, something produced as if by the friction of her shoes against the streets. She was at her truest, it seemed to her, in these tingling moments.”
“I'm sorry you aren't as brave as you thought you were. But don't punish me because of it.”
“The rest of us become narrow and mean when we live falsely. I'm sick to death of living falsely. I've been doing it for years.”
“She was at her truest, it seemed to her, in these tingling moments—these moments when, paradoxically, she was also at her most anonymous.”
“For was that all, she thought bleakly, that love ever was? Something that saved one from loneliness? A sort of insurance policy against not counting?”
“They made her feel lonelier, suddenly, than she had ever felt before. She went creeping into her room and undressed without lighting a candle, then lay curled in bed in a ferment of misery. What was the use of her being alive? Her heart was some desiccated thing: a prune, a fossil, a piece of clinker. Her mouth might as well be filled with ashes. It was all utterly hopeless and futile . . .”
“The jury had persuaded themselves that he was decent, because they had wanted to think that in his shoes they would have been decent too. They had no idea how decency, loyalty, courage, how it all shrivelled away when one was frightened.”
“Sometimes the shortest journeys take longest, don’t they?”
“It was like a cure, being with Lilian. It made one feel like a piece of wax being cradled in a soft, warm palm.”
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Book Keywords:
bravery, judgement
