Diane Setterfield Quotes

#1. Suggested Reading Louis Bayard, The Black Tower; Sarah Blake, Grange House; F. G. Cottam, The House of Lost Souls; Michael Cox, The Glass of Time; Mark Frost, The List of Seven; John Harwood, The Ghost Writer; Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale.

Susan Hill

#2. Endings that are muted, but which echo longer in the memory than louder, more explosive denouements.

Diane Setterfield

#3. He turned from the daughters of minor aristocrats to those of farriers, farmers and foresters. Personally he couldn't tell the difference, yet the world seemed to mind less.

Diane Setterfield

#4. The doctor knew his wife was beautiful, but they had been married too long for it to make any difference to him.

Diane Setterfield

#5. I felt a strange sensation inside. Like the past coming to life. The watery stirring of a previous life turning in my belly, creating a tide that rose in my veins and sent cool wavelets to lap at my temples. The ghastly excitement of it.

Diane Setterfield

#6. Miss Lea, it doesn't do to get attached to these secondary characters. It's not their story.

Diane Setterfield

#7. People whose lives are not balanced by a healthy love of money suffer from an appalling obsession with personal integrity.

Diane Setterfield

#8. My genius is not so frail a thing that it cowers from the dirty fingers of newspapernen.

Diane Setterfield

#9. In the background is the hiss of the gas heater; we hear the sound without hearing it for, side by side, together and miles apart, we are deep in our books.

Diane Setterfield

#10. [They] took it upon themselves to start the laborious process of cranking up life again, after death has stopped us all in its tracks.

Diane Setterfield

#11. But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.

Diane Setterfield

#12. My liking for Scandinavian crime fiction led me into exploring literary writers from the same countries.

Diane Setterfield

#13. She will not be clever, but still, I see no reason why she should not one day lead a satisfying life separately from her sister. Perhaps she might even marry. All men do not seek intelligence in a wife, and Emmeline is very affectionate.

Diane Setterfield

#14. As for you, you are alive. But it's not the same as living.

Diane Setterfield

#15. Boys do not leave their boyhood behind when they leave off their school uniform.

Diane Setterfield

#16. Silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words.

Diane Setterfield

#17. I looked out into the dead garden. Against the fading light, my shadow hovered in the glass, looking into the dead room. What did she make of us? I wondered. What did she think of our attempts to persuade ourselves that this was life and that we were really living it?

Diane Setterfield

#18. The funeral was over, at last I could cry. Except that I couldn't. My tears, kept in too long, had fossilized. They would have to stay in forever now.

Diane Setterfield

#19. In speech he stretched out his vowel sounds to give his mouth a rest before the next consonant.

Diane Setterfield

#20. It was not the sun, but the moonlight that shimmered in the garden, edging the leaves with silver and touching the outlines of the statuary figures.

Diane Setterfield

#21. He has described in precise, measured words the beautiful desolation he feels at the close of novels where the message is that there is no end to human suffering, only endurance.

Diane Setterfield

#22. For at eight o'clock the world came to an end. It was reading time. The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours.

Diane Setterfield

#23. They were like amputees, only it was not a limb they were missing, but their very souls.

Diane Setterfield

#24. Our clients' faces, with the customary outward paleness and inner glow of the book lover.

Diane Setterfield

#25. Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Familes are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole.

Diane Setterfield

#26. We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, weight and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all.

Diane Setterfield

#27. There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.

Diane Setterfield

#28. Emmeline didn't call me anything. She didn't need, for I was always there. You only need names for the absent.

Diane Setterfield

#29. Writing is more about discovery than invention.

Diane Setterfield

#30. The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours. Against the blue candlewick bedspread the white pages of my open book, illuminated by a circle of lamplight, were the gateway to another world.

Diane Setterfield

#31. Certainly for myself I believe I would always wish to know the truth, but then I also wish to never have to face a truth I cannot bear. Being able to look truth in the face might be brave, or it might just mean you have been lucky in the truth you were dealt.

Diane Setterfield

#32. She was a do-gooder,

Diane Setterfield

#33. A great many people, he had noticed, spent large parts of their time worrying about things they were powerless to alter. Had they concentrated all this energy on things they could influence, think how different their lives would be.

Diane Setterfield

#34. I have kept a reading diary since I was 18. I am jealous of my friend who has kept hers since she was ten.

Diane Setterfield

#35. Ten years of marriage is usually enough to cure marital affection, but Angelfield was an odd fellow, and there it was.

Diane Setterfield

#36. A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

Diane Setterfield

#37. To anyone who took the trouble to look, I was plainly visible, but when people are expecting to see nothing, that is usually what they see.

Diane Setterfield

#38. I have written a number of short biographical studies of insignificant personages from literary history. My interest has always been in writing biographies of the also-rans: people who lived in the shadow of fame in their own lifetime and who, since their death, have sunk into profound obscurity.

Diane Setterfield

#39. Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words on the other hand, were a lifeline. They left their hushed rhythm behind, a counter to the slow in and out of Emmeline's breathing.

Diane Setterfield

#40. Ordinary people, untwins, seek their soulmate, take lovers, marry. Tormented by their incompleteness they strive to be part of a pair.

Diane Setterfield

#41. But he is a man, hence cannot see how tiresome it is to have explained at length what one has already fully understood.

Diane Setterfield

#42. Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating.

Diane Setterfield

#43. An unrested mind is prone to wander into unfruitful avenues; it is nothing that a good night's sleep cannot cure.

Diane Setterfield

#44. But there can be no secrets in a house where there are children.

Diane Setterfield

#45. Rebuilt in Victorian times, it retained the modesty of its medieval origins. Small and neat, its spire indicated the direction of heaven without trying to pierce a hole in it.

Diane Setterfield

#46. What better place to kill time than a library?

Diane Setterfield

#47. Someone had told him once that the desire to do something well is a good indicator of talent.

Diane Setterfield

#48. My story - my own personal story - ended before my writing began. Storytelling has only ever been a way of filling in the time since everything finished.

Diane Setterfield

#49. We are made of the stories we have heard and read all through our lives.

Diane Setterfield

#50. The wealth they had accumulated from retail needed to hide its origins, for it is well known that the purity of gold increases the further removed it is from labor.

Diane Setterfield

#51. I know there are people who don't read fiction at all, and I find it hard to understand how they can bear to be inside the same head all the time.

Diane Setterfield

#52. On those days when he could not spend half an hour in the company of a good book, he felt deprived.

Diane Setterfield

#53. He has explained why it is that ambiguity touches his heart more nearly than the death and marriage style of finish that i prefer.

Diane Setterfield

#54. What better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books?

Diane Setterfield

#55. Seventeen years being neither a very short nor a very long time, Phillip was remembered and misremembered in equal measure.

Diane Setterfield

#56. You have to relax, write what you write. It sounds easy but it's really, really hard. One of the things it took me longest to learn was to trust the writing process.

Diane Setterfield

#57. A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else's story.

Diane Setterfield

#58. Sometimes when you open the door to the past, what you confront is your destiny.

Diane Setterfield

#59. Of course I recognized it. How could I not, for I had read it goodness knows how many times. 'Jane Eyre,' I said wonderingly.
'You recognized it? Yes, it is. I asked a man in a library. It's by Charlotte someone. She had a lot of sisters, apparently.

Diane Setterfield

#60. I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child.

Diane Setterfield

#61. Yesterday or the day before, while I had been going about my business, quietly and in private, some unknown person - some stranger - had gone to the trouble of marking my name onto this envelope. Who was it who had had his mind's eye on me while I hadn't suspected a thing?

Diane Setterfield

#62. Life is compost.

Diane Setterfield

#63. Perhaps it didn't matter, I told myself. Who was there to miss me? No one would suffer from my going. That was a blessing.

Diane Setterfield

#64. I made a resolution to telephone my mother the next day, but it was a safe resolution; no one can hold you to a decision made in middle of the night.And then my spine sent me an alarm. A presence. Here. Now. At my side.

Diane Setterfield

#65. One of the first keys to success, he considered, was to recognize the difference between problems you could do something about and problems you could do nothing about.

Diane Setterfield

#66. The imagination is a healthy thing, and a great many scientific discoveries could not have been made without it, but it need to be harnessed to some serious object if it is to come to anything.

Diane Setterfield

#67. They stood in silence, looking at floorboards and corners of cornices and other such insignificances, their curiosity and compassion at the ready. They were waiting so hard that when the door cracked and Bellman appeared, they jumped.

Diane Setterfield

#68. Of course I loved books more than people.

Diane Setterfield

#69. At first the boys were puzzled by illness. They looked at their father from the other side of a wall of pain, bewildered that their father stood writing in his book, when he had only to reach over the division and lift them clear of it.

Diane Setterfield

#70. We live like latecomers to the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the begging from the shape of later events.

Diane Setterfield

#71. L'appetit vient en mangeant. Appetite comes by eating. Your appetite will come back, but it must be met halfway. You must want it to come.

Diane Setterfield

#72. Opening the book, i inhaled. the smell of old books, so sharp, so dry you can taste it.

Diane Setterfield

#73. Prescription: 'Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. Take ten pages, twice a day, til end of course.

Diane Setterfield

#74. A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.

Diane Setterfield

#75. I am always happy up a ladder with a paintbrush in my hand. And I wish I had more time to spend in the garden - not least because I get good ideas for writing when I'm out there.

Diane Setterfield

#76. I've nothing against people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions.

Diane Setterfield

#77. Her eyes were too full of beauty to leave room for anything so mundane as intelligence.

Diane Setterfield

#78. I see people as haunted by the selves they don't know ... I don't have children, but I have nieces and nephews, and one thing I notice is how fascinated they are by stories of their lives before they can remember.

Diane Setterfield

#79. The line between life and death is narrow and dark, and a bereaved twin lives closer to it than most.

Diane Setterfield

#80. So they became friends, the way old married couples often do, and enjoyed the tender loyalty that awaits the lucky on the other side of passion, without ever living the passion itself.

Diane Setterfield

#81. People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think of them.

Diane Setterfield

#82. You leave the previous book with idea's and themes - characters even - caught in the fibers of your clothing - and when you open a new book, they are still with you.

Diane Setterfield

#83. What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney?

Diane Setterfield

#84. All children mythologise their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won't be the truth: it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.

Diane Setterfield

#85. No one can hold you to a decision made in the middle of the night.

Diane Setterfield

#86. It doesn't do to get attached to these secondary characters. It's not their story. They come and go, and when they go, they're gone for good.

Diane Setterfield

#87. One gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people.

Diane Setterfield

#88. Miss Winter restored to me the virginal qualities of the novice reader, and then with her stories she ravished me.

Diane Setterfield

#89. For several decades, I believed it was necessary to be extraordinary if you wanted to write, and since I wasn't, I gave up my ambition and settled down to a life of reading.

Diane Setterfield

#90. But only when it was too late did they realize the price they must pay for escaping their destiny. Every Happy Ever After was tainted. Fate, at first so amenable, so reasonable, so open to negotiation, ends up by exacting a cruel revenge for happiness.

Diane Setterfield

#91. Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so.

Diane Setterfield

#92. Without the past to cast its long shadow, might you see the future more clearly?

Diane Setterfield

#93. We live like latecomers at the theatre; we must catch up as best we can, dividing the beginning from the shape of later events.

Diane Setterfield

#94. She could not read a book for fear of the feelings she might find in it.

Diane Setterfield

#95. If you dazzle a man with green eyes, he'll be so hypnotized that he won't notice there is something inside the eyes spying on him.

Diane Setterfield

#96. Since we are on the topic of ravens, a collective noun for ravens is an unkindness. This is somewhat puzzling to Thought and Memory.

Diane Setterfield

#97. Sometimes you can know things. Things about yourself. Things from before you can remember.

Diane Setterfield

#98. My mother and I were like two continents moving slowly but inexorably apart; my father, the bridge builder, constantly extending the fragile edifice he had constructed to connect us.

Diane Setterfield

#99. There are times when the human face and body can express the yearning of the heart so accurately that you can, as they say, read them like a book. Do not abandon me.

Diane Setterfield

#100. For it must be very lonely being dead.

Diane Setterfield