Diane Setterfield citations

“There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.”

“A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Reading can be dangerous.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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”

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