Sarah Waters Quotes

The show is like an Edwardian play - emotional life gets stepped on for the sake of accepted manners, and that's terrific for actors to play in.

Lyall had spent centuries nibbling about the great layered cake that was polite society while Lord Akeldama acted the part of the frosting on its top.

Rightly or wrongly, the Victorian considered that there were certain subjects which were not meet for inter-sexual discussion, just as they held that certain processes of the feminine toilet, like the powdering of the nose and the application of lipstick to the mouth, were (if done at all) better done in private.

The man Dickens, whom the world at large thought it knew, stood for all the Victorian virtues - probity, kindness, hard work, sympathy for the down-trodden, the sanctity of domestic life - even as his novels exposed the violence, hypocrisy, greed, and cruelty of the Victorian age.

It was the Victorians who covered the piano legs and drew a heavy curtain over what a lady got up to in her boudoir.

Everything is always grungy in England, no? It's like a little shibboleth of the upper class, wearing something out of your grandfather's trunk.

An Edwardian lady in full dress was a wonder to behold, and her preparations for viewing were awesome.

The largest and most influential houses chiefly demonstrate the aloofness of the French approach.

I like period drama because everyone is so restrained, but they have all these emotions raging underneath.

There's a certain kind of insular, old-fashioned, upper-class Britishness that gives me the spooks. I am sure that comes from a boarding-school trauma.

I think poshness is very funny! But I think it's also delightful. There's something wonderful and very innocent about it, particularly with the Edwardians.

You do see some outrageous things and people in Beverly Hills. I'm not always quite sure what to make of it.

As with most things in life, Lady Maccon preferred the civilized exterior to the dark underbelly (with the exception of pork products, of course.)

Victorian sorrow: the stars are winking in the sky, but not for us.

LADY BRACKNELL: Do you smoke? JACK: Well, yes, I must admit I smoke. LADY BRACKNELL: I'm glad to hear it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind.

Tired, ashamed, and mortified, I begged to sit down till we returned home, which I did soon after. Lord Orville did me the honour to hand me to the coach, talking all the way of the honour I had done him ! O these fashionable people!

How I wish I lived in a Jane Austen novel!

When oranges came in, a curious proceeding was gone through. Miss Jenkyns did not like to cut the fruit, for, as she observed, the juice all ran out nobody knew where, sucking [only I think she used some more recondite word] was in fact the only way of enjoying oranges; but then there was the unpleasant association with a ceremony frequently gone through by little babies; and so, after dessert, in orange season, Miss Jenkyns and Miss Matty used to rise up, possess themselves each of an orange in silence, and withdraw to the privacy of their own rooms to indulge in sucking oranges.

The rich, like well brought up children, are meant to be seen, not heard.

I was asked whether I was trying to restore Victorian values. I said straight out I was. And I am.

I was every Londoner's stereotypical idea of a brash, vulgar American. When I got here, it turned out that London was the Wild West, and New York was like London at the height of the Victorian era, in which everyone was far more obsessed with table manners and status-climbing than they are in London. In London, everyone was just crawling over this blizzard of cocaine. Here, if you have more than a glass of wine with your meal, people refer you to Alcoholics Anonymous.

Good manners can render even virtue tolerable.

In the ordinary course of things, how many succeed in society merely by virtue of their manners, while others, however meritorious, fail through lack of them? After all, it's only barbarians who wear uncut precious stones.

In Victorian times the purpose of life was to develop a personality once and for all and then stand on it.

She was the only doctor's wife in Branford, Maine, who hung her wash on an outdoor clothesline instead of putting it through a dryer, because she liked to look out the window and see the clothes blowing in the wind. She had been especially delighted, one day, when one sleeve of the top of her husband's pajamas, prodded by the stiff breeze off the bay, reached over and grabbed her nightgown around the waist.