Affinity Quotes

“Why do gentlemen's voices carry so clearly, when women's are so easily stifled?”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity

“Your twisting is done--you have the last thread of my heart. I wonder: when the thread grows slack, will you feel it?”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity

“It is a world that is made of love. Did you think there is only the kind of love your sister knows for her husband? Did you think there must be here, a man with whiskers, and over here, a lady in a gown? Haven't I said, there are no whiskers and gowns where spirits are? And what will your sister do if her husband should die, and she should take another? Who will she fly to then, when she has crossed the spheres? For she will fly to someone, we will all fly to someone, we will all return to that piece of shining matter from which our souls were torn with another, two halves of the same. It may be that the husband your sister has now has that other soul, that has the affinity with her soul—I hope it is. But it may be the next man she takes, or it may be neither. It may be someone she would never think to look to on the earth, someone kept from her by some false boundary...”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity

“How will a person know, Selina, when the soul that has the affinity with hers is near it?" She answered, "She will know. Does she look for air, before she breathes it? This love will be guided to her; and when it comes, she will know. And she will do anything to keep that love about her, then. Because to lose it will be like a death to her.”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity

“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.”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity

“You're not sure? Look at your own fingers. Are you not sure, if they are yours? Look at any part of you - it might be me that you are looking at! We are the same, you and I. We have been cut, two halves, from the same piece of shinning matter. Oh, I could say, I love you - that is a simple thing to say, the sort of thing your sister might say to her husband. I could say that in a prison letter, four times a year. but my spirit does not love yours - it is entwined with it. Our flesh does not love: our flesh is the same, and longs to leap to itself. It must do that or wither! You are like me.”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity

“Now I have more freedom than I have ever had at any time in my life, and I do only the things I always have. They were empty before, but Selina has given a meaning to them, I do them for her. I am waiting, for her - but, waiting, I think, is too poor a word for it. I am engaged with the substance of the minutes as they pass. I feel the surface of my flesh stir - it is like the surface of the sea that knows the moon is drawing near it. If I take up a book, I might as well never have seen a line of print before - books are filled, now, with messages aimed only at me. An hour ago, I found this:

The blood is listening in my frame,
And thronging shadows, fast and thick,
Fall on my overflowing eyes...

It is as if every poet who ever wrote a line to his own love wrote secretly for me, and for Selina. My blood - even as I write this - my blood, my muscle and every fibre of me, is listening, for her. When I sleep, it is to dream of her. When shadows move across my eye, I know them now for shadows of her. My room is still, but never silent - I hear her heart, beating across the night in time to my own. My room is dark, but darkness is different for me now. I know all its depths and textures - darkness like velvet, darkness like felt, darkness bristling as coir or prison wool.”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity

“Perhaps, however, it is the same with spinsters as with ghosts; and one has to be of their ranks in order to see them at all.”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity

“There seemed something rather devotional about her pose, the still­ness, so that I thought at last, She is praying!, and made to draw my eyes away in sudden shame. But then she stirred. Her hands opened, she raised them to her cheek, and I caught a flash of colour against the pink of her work-roughened palms. She had a flower there, between her fingers—a violet, with a drooping stem. As I watched, she put the flower to her lips, and breathed upon it, and the purple of the petals gave a quiver and seemed to glow . . .”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity

“The vase was placed upon my desk, and there were orange-blossoms in it—orange-blossoms, in an English winter!”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity

“She shook her head, and closed her eyes. I felt her weariness then, and with it, my own. I felt it dark and heavy upon me, darker and heavier than any drug they ever gave me - it seemed heavy as death. I looked at the bed. I have seemed to see our kisses there sometimes, I've seen them hanging in the curtains, like bats, ready to swoop. Now, I thought, I might jolt the post and they would only fall, and shatter, and turn to powder.”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity

“They might be kind, I thought. They might be sensible and good. They will not be like you.
But I did not say it. I knew it would mean nothing to her. I said something - something ordinary and mild, I cannot think what. And after a time she came and kissed my cheek, and then she left me.”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity

“I had a very clear vision, of Selina with her hair about her shoulders, a crimson hat upon her head, a velvet coat, ice-skates - I must have been remembering some picture. I imagined myself beside her, the air coming sharply into our mouths. I imagined how it would be if I took her, not to Italy, but only to Marishes, to my sister's house; if I sat with her at supper, and shared her room, and kissed her -

I cannot say what would frighten them most - her being a spirit-medium, or a convict, or a girl.

”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity

“Don’t you think that queer? That a common coarse-featured woman might drink morphia and be sent to gaol for it, while I am saved and sent to visit her—and all because I am a lady?”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity

“My locket hangs in my closet beside the glass, the only shining thing among so many shadows.”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity

“Every poor lady that came to me, that touched my hand, that drew a small part of my spirit from me to her—they were only shadows. Aurora, they were shadows of you! I was only seeking you out, as you were seeking me. You were seeking me, your own affinity. And if you let them keep me from you now, I think we shall die!”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity

“But the words came from me, I seemed to feel the shape and taste of them as they left my mouth. I might have sat there and been sick upon the table—they could not have silenced me.”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity

“You have come to Millbank, to look on women more wretched than yourself, in the hope that it will make you well again.”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity

“my spirit does not love yours—it is entwined with it. Our flesh does not love: our flesh is the same, and longs to leap to itself. It must do that, or wither!”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity

“It is a world that is made of love. Did you think there is only the kind of love your sister has for her husband? Did you think there must be here, a man with whiskers, and over here, a lady in a gown? Haven't I said, there are no whiskers and gowns where spirits are? And what will your sister do if her husband should die, and she should take another? Who will she fly to then, when she has crossed the spheres? For she will fly to someone, we will all fly to someone, we will all return to that piece of shining matter from which our souls were torn with another, two halves of the same.”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity

“She raised her head when she heard my step, and her gaze met my own, over the matron's dipping shoulder, and her eyes grew bright. I knew then how hard it had been to keep, not just from Millbank but from her. I felt that little quickening. It was just as I imagine a woman must feel, when the baby within her gives its first kick.
Does it matter if I feel that, that is so small, and silent, and secret?”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity

“There was a prisoner, I said, in the first cell of the second passage. A fair-haired girl, quite young, quite handsome. What did Miss Craven know of her? The matron's face had grown sour when talking of Cook. Now it grew sour again. 'Selina Dawes,' she said. 'A queer one. Keeps her eyes and her mind to herself--that's all I know. I've heard her called the easiest prisoner in the gaol. They say she has never given an hour's trouble since she was brought here. Deep, I call her.' Deep? 'As the ocean.”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity

“She studied me. It was then she said I had grown cynical. I said, that I had always been cynical—she had only never called it that. She had said rather that I was brave. She had called me an original. She had seemed to admire me for it. That made her colour again; but it also made her sigh. She walked from me and stood at the bed—and I said at once, ‘Don’t go too near the bed! Don’t you know it’s haunted, by our old kisses? They’ll come and frighten you.”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity

“I wish you will remember me with kindness, not with pain. Your pain will not help me, where I am going. But your kindness will help my mother, and my brother, as it helped them once before. I wish that, if anyone should look for faults in this, then they will find them with me, with me and my queer nature, that set me so at odds with the world and all its ordinary rules, I could not find a place in it to live and be content. That this has always been true—well, you of course know that, better than anyone. But you cannot know the glimpses I have had, you cannot know there is another, dazzling place, that seems to welcome me!”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity

“You may say that, now Dawes has gone. You didn’t think our locks so hard—nor our matrons, perhaps—when they kept her neat and close, for you to gaze at!”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity

“You believe that to be a medium you must hold your spirit aside to let another spirit come. That however, is not how it is. You must rather be a servant of the spirits, you must become a plastic instrument for the spirits’ own hands. You must let your spirit be used, your prayer must be always May I be used.”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity

“We are not here to help them, ma’am. We are here to punish them. There are too many good women who are poor or ill or hungry, for us to bother with the bad ones.”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity

“It was then she said I had grown cynical. I said, that I had always been cynical—she had only never called it that. She had said rather that I was brave. She had called me an original. She had seemed to admire me for it.”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity

“But Helen, Helen,’ I said, ‘if they expect it to be hard, why don’t they change things, to allow it to be easier?”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity

“To forget words, common words, because your habits are so narrow you need only know a hundred hard phrases—stone, soup, comb, Bible, needle, dark, prisoner, walk, stand still, look sharp, look sharp!”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity