Fingersmith

by Sarah Waters

He never took chances: that’s what made him so good.

We could pass ice, in August, before a quarter of the block should have had a chance to turn to water. We could pass sunshine in summer—Mr Ibbs would find a buyer for it.

For to be brave about a thing like that, you must first be sorry. And how could I be sorry, for someone I never knew?

The idea made me shiver, rather; for it was queer to think of being loved, not just for my own sake, but for someone’s I never knew . . .

You cannot be a thief and always troubling over hazards, you should go mad.

Your fortune’s still to be made.—I

We were thinking of secrets. Real secrets, and snide. Too many to count. When I try now to sort out who knew what and who knew nothing, who knew everything and who was a fraud, I have to stop and give it up, it makes my head spin.

I thought back to all the times I had watched her tremble before, and wondered how I had ever mistaken that trembling for love.

‘Men’s truths are different from ladies’.

Not to read! It seems to me a kind of fabulous insufficiency—like the absence, in a martyr or a saint, of the capacity for pain.

Everything has changed. Nothing has changed, at all.

And so you see it is love—not scorn, not malice; only love—that makes me harm her, in the end.

But he is a man in love with his own roguery.

For the world is cruel to girls. I

thoughts were hammers or picks I should have been free, ten thousand times over. But my thoughts were more like poisons. I had so many, they made me sick. It was

Luck’s like the tide: it turns, then gets faster and can’t be stopped.’

‘You can’t cheat luck like that. The best you can do is, try and outface it.’