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The Little Stranger QUOTES

The Little Stranger QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " A family man never makes a good family doctor; he has too many worries of his own. "

― Sarah Waters , The Little Stranger

3 " Can't people do hurtful things, sometimes, and not even know they're doing them? "

― Sarah Waters , The Little Stranger

4 " 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

5 " We see what a punishing business it is, simply being alive. "

― Sarah Waters , The Little Stranger

6 " 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

7 " 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

8 " 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

9 " Her eyes are like fingers. They can touch. They can press and pinch. "

― Sarah Waters , The Little Stranger

10 " 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

11 " 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

12 " And perhaps there is a limit to the grieving that the human heart can do. "

― Sarah Waters , The Little Stranger

13 " 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

14 " modern dances always seem to me so vulgar. So much hopping about; like a scene from a mental ward! "

― Sarah Waters , The Little Stranger

15 " He was just the sort of man to have faith in leeches. Leeches, and licorice, and cod-liver oil. "

― Sarah Waters , The Little Stranger

16 " I'm like a weather-vane, I start twitching when the wind's on the turn. "

― Sarah Waters , The Little Stranger

17 " Her eyes were still closed, and in the darkness, in her dark dress and coat, she seemed an assemblage of angular fragments... "

― Sarah Waters , The Little Stranger

18 " ...I made what can only have been a few rather idiotic observations about the bricks. "

― Sarah Waters , The Little Stranger

19 " ...keeping their gimlet eyes on one's affairs... "

― Sarah Waters , The Little Stranger

20 " ...and claws of creeping foxes. "

― Sarah Waters , The Little Stranger