Diane Setterfield Quotes

“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.”

“Tragedy alters everything.”

“For me to see is to read. It has always been that way.”

“Sometimes you can know things. Things about yourself. Things from before you can remember.”

“For it must be very lonely being dead.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“opening the book, i inhaled. the smell of old books, so sharp, so dry you can taste it.”

“Of course I loved books more than people.”

“Reading can be dangerous.”

“I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy”

“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.”

“What better place to kill time than a library?”

“What better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books?”

“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.”

“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.”

“Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother, but the rest of the time there was none. This story is about one of those other times.”

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

“I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone.”

“Everybody has a story. It's like families. You might not know who they are, might have lost them, but they exist all the same. You might drift apart or you might turn your back on them, but you can't say you haven't got them. Same goes for stories.”

“Sometimes when you open the door to the past, what you confront is your destiny.”

“Writing is more about discovery than invention.”

“One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else.”

“When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic, yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.”

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

“She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.”

“When one is nothing, one invents. It fills a void.”

“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.”

“In this cruel world kindness should always be repaid.”

“There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner.”

“What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney?”

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

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

“Life is compost.”

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

“We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delinaments, weight and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all.
I know, he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.”

“Fate, at first so amenable, so reasonable, so open to negotiation, ends up by exacting a cruel revenge for happiness.”