The Night Watch Quotes

“Why is it we can never love the people we ought to?”
― Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

“She supposed that houses, after all - like the lives that were lived in them - were mostly made of space. It was the spaces, in fact, which counted, rather than the bricks.”
― Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

“life is crap but, every day is an experience”
― Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

“Helen opened her eyes and gazed into the luminous blue of the sky. Was it crazy, she wondered, to be as grateful as she felt now, for moments like this, in a world that had atomic bombs in it—and concentration camps, and gas chambers? People were still tearing each other into pieces. There was still murder, starvation, unrest, in Poland, Palestine, India—God knew where else. Britain itself was sliding into bankruptcy and decay. Was it a kind of idiocy or selfishness, to want to be able to give yourself over to the trifles: to the parp of the Regent’s Park Band; to the sun on your face, the prickle of grass beneath your heels, the movement of cloudy beer in your veins, the secret closeness of your lover? Or were those trifles all you had? Oughtn’t you, precisely, to preserve them? To make little crystal drops of them, that you could keep, like charms on a bracelet, to tell against danger when next it came?”
― Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

“I've given up reading the papers. Since the world's so obviously bent on killing itself, I decided months ago to sit back and let it.”
― Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

“The best thing to do was to brazen it out, throw your head back, walk with a swagger, make a 'character' of yourself. It was tiring, sometimes, when you hadn't the energy for it; that's all.”
― Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

“How easy it was, she thought unhappily as she did it, for men and women. They could stand in a street and argue, flirt - they could kiss, make love, do anything at all - and the world indulged them.”
― Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

“I'll burn myself, or I'll cut myself. For a burn or a cut might be shown, might be nursed, might scar or heal, would be a miserable kind of emblem; would anyway be there, on the surface of her body, rather than corroding it from within. Now the thought came to her again, that she might scar herself in some way. It came, like the solution to a problem: I won't be doing it like some hysterical girl. I won't be hoping she'll come catch me at it. It won't be like lying on the sitting-room floor. I'll be doing it for myself, as a secret.”
― Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

“[...] You're not in love with anyone, are you?'
'No,' said Kay. 'Someone's in love with me, as it happens. A grand person, too… But that's another secret. I'm thinking of the morphia, you see. I'm counting on your not being able to remember any of this.'
'Why is it a secret?'
'I promised the person it would be, that's all.'
'But you won't love him back?'
Kay smiled. 'You'd think I would, wouldn't you? But, isn't it funny—we never seem to love the people we ought to, I can't think why…”
― Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

“You expect things to change, or people to change; but it's silly, isn't it? Because people and things don't change. Not really. You just have to get used to them.”
― Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

“They had been patient, all this time. They'd lived in darkness. They'd lived without salt, without scent. They'd fed themselves little scraps of pleasure, like pairings of cheese. Now she became aware if the minutes as they passed: she felt them, suddenly, for what they were, as fragments of her life, her youth, that were rushing away like so many drops of water, never to return.”
― Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

“She let her head sink, until her brow met the varnished glass. How easy it was, she thought unhappily as she did it, for men and women. They could stand in a street and argue, flirt—they could kiss, make love, do anything at all—and the world indulged them. Whereas she and Julia—”
― Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

“Get over it. What a funny phrase that is! As if one’s grief is a fallen house, and one has to pick one’s way over the rubble to the ground on the other side…”
― Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

“They settled back into an embrace - as if it was nothing, as if it was easy; as if they weren't two boys, in a prison, in a city being blown and shot to bits; as if it was the most natural thing in the world.”
― Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

“I must be better, she thought—realising it then, in that moment, for the first time. I must be OK.”
― Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

“A man ought to be a source of shame to his father, don’t you think? If I ever have a son, I hope he makes my life hell. How, otherwise, will there ever be any progress?”
― Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

“Viv rubbed her arms. “A man in the Evening Standard said our winters will go on getting colder and colder, and longer and longer; that in ten years we’ll all be living like Eskimo’s.”
“Eskimo’s!” said Helen, picturing fur hats and wide, friendly faces; quite fancying the idea.
“That’s what he said. He said it was something to do with the angle of the earth – that we knocked it off-balance with all those bombs. It makes sense, if you think about it. He said it served us right.”
“Oh,” said Helen, people in newspapers are always writing things like that. Do you remember someone at the start of the war, saying the whole thing was a punishment on us for letting our king abdicate?”
“Yes,” said Viv. “I always thought that was a bit hard on everyone in France and Norway and places like that. I mean, it wasn’t their king, after all.”
― Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

“One gets paid back in the way one deserves.”
― Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

“La felicità è una cosa talmente fragile di questi tempi. E' come se non ce ne fosse abbastanza per tutti.”
― Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

“Or were those trifles all you had? Oughtn’t you, precisely, to preserve them? To make little crystal drops of them, that you could keep, like charms on a bracelet, to tell against danger when next it came?”
― Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

“just as, when you were well, you never thought about being well, you could only really feel what it was like to be healthy for about a minute, when you stopped being sick. But when you were sick, it made you into a stranger, a foreigner in your own land. Everything that was simple and ordinary to everyone else became like an enemy to you. Your own body became like an enemy to you, plotting and scheming against you and setting traps…”
― Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

“You wait 'til you're my age, and wake every morning to gaze on the vast tract of uncreased linen that is the other side of the divan. Try being gallant to that... We shan't even have children, don't forget, to look after us in our old age.”
― Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

“She wished for a moment that they were all children again. It still seemed extraordinary to her, that everything had turned out the way it had.”
― Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

“She looked again at Julia's handsome, fragile figure and thought, What is it about Julia? Why is she always so alone?”
― Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

“It was done the day you took me to that house in Bryanston Square, she said. Or even, the time before that, when you bought me tea. We stood in the sun, and you closed your eyes and I looked at your face...I think it was done then, Julia.”
― Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

“They settled back into
an embrace - as if it was nothing, as if it
was easy; as if they weren't two boys, in
a prison, in a city being blown and shot
to bits; as if it was the most natural thing
in the world.”
― Sarah Waters, The Night Watch