Sarah Waters Dickensian lesbian novel has been adapted into a BBC mini-series and served as the inspiration for Park Chan-Wook’s 2016 film The Handmaiden. As fun as it is to watch Sue and Maud’s story play out on the screen, we’re still obsessed with the original text.

Check out the 21 best quotes from Fingersmith below!

1.

“Stripping a lady is heavy work. Her corset was long, with a busk of steel; her waist, I think I have said, was narrow: the kind of waist the doctors speak against, that give a girl an illness. Her crinoline was made of watchspring. Her hair, inside its net, was fixed with a half a pound of pins, and a comb of silver. Her petticoats and shimmy were calico. Underneath it all, however, she was soft and smooth as butter. Too soft, I thought her. I imagined her bruising. She was like a lobster without its shell.”

2.

“Your heart—as you call it—and hers are alike, after all: they are like mine, like everyone’s. They resemble nothing so much as those meters you will find on gas-pipes: they only perk up and start pumping when you drop coins in.”

3.

“But her chances had all been dealt her, year before. She was like a twig on a rushing river. She was like milk—too pale, too pure, too simple. She was made to be spoiled.”

4.

“But in the hours in between, when she went to her uncle, I felt her—I felt her, through the walls of the house, like some blind crooks are said to be able to feel gold. It was as if there had come between us, without my knowing, a kind of thread. It pulled me to her, wherever she was. It was like—

It’s like you love her, I thought.

It made a change in me. It made me nervous and afraid. I thought she would look at me and see it…”

5.

“She was holding her cloak about her face, but when she saw me turn to her she reached and took my hand. She took it, not to be led by me, not to be comforted; only to hold it, because it was mine.”

6.

“Hate yourself, then. We’re alike, you and I. More alike than you know. You think the world ought to love us, for the kinks int he fibres of our hearts? The world scorns us. Thank God it does! There was never a profit to be got from love; from scorn, however, you may twist riches, as filthy water may be wrung from a cloth. You know it is true. You are like me. I say it again: hate me, hate yourself.”

7.

“Oh, but this, […] is perfect! This is all I have longed for! Why do you stare? What are you gazing at? Do you suppose a girl is sitting here? That girl is lost! She has been drowned! She is lying, fathoms deep. Do you think she has arms and legs, with flesh and cloth upon them? Do you think she has hair? She has only bones, stripped white! She is as white as a page of paper! She is a book, from which the words have peeled and drifted—”

8.

“I must get out. I must get out! I must get out of London—go anywhere—back to Briar. I must get money. I must, I think—this is the clearest thought of all—I must get Sue!”

9.

“What’s Sue, to me? I’m afraid, here, to remember the pressing of her mouth, the sliding of her hand. But I’m afraid, too, of forgetting. I wish I could dream of her. I never do. Sometimes I take out the picture of the woman I supposed my mother, and look for her features there—her eyes, her pointed chin.”

10.

“But, here was a curious thing. The more I tried to give up thinking of her, the more I said to myself, ‘She’s nothing to you’, the harder I tried to pluck the idea of her out of my heart, the more she stayed there.”

11.

“What does it say?” I said, when I had. She said, “It is filled with all the words for how I want you…”

12.

“I suppose I really seemed mad, then; but it was only through the awfulness of having said nothing but the truth, and being thought to be deluded.”

13.

“There is no patience so terrible as that of the deranged.”

14.

“I felt that thread that had come between us, tugging, tugging at my heart—so hard, it hurt me.”

15.

“Everybody in my world knew that regular work was only another name for being robbed and dying of boredom.”

16.

“My happiness is nothing to him,” she said. “Only his books! He has made me like a book. I am not meant to be taken, and touched, and liked. I am meant to keep here, in dim light, forever!”

17.

“If I had said, I love you, she would have said it back; and everything would have changed.”

18.

“You thought her a pigeon. Pigeon, my arse. That bitch knew everything. She had been in on it from the start.”

19.

“After all, this is how it is done, in my uncle’s books: two girls, one wise and one unknowing […] It is easy. I say my part, and she ―with a little prompting ― says hers.”

20.

“Now I feel myself a book, as books must seem to her: she looks at me with unreading eyes, sees the shape, but not the meaning of the text. She marks the white flesh ―‘Ain’t you pale!’ she says ― but not the quick, corrupted blood beneath.”

21.

“…she had made me love her, when I meant only to ruin her.”