Diane Setterfield Quotes & Sayings

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

I reached for the prescription. In a vigorous scrawl, he inked: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. Take ten pages, twice a day, till end of course. — Diane Setterfield

She had not had the relief of amnesia. She had suffered longer, and she had suffered more. Each second was agony in the first weeks. She was like an amputee in the days before anesthesia, half crazed with pain, astounded that the human body could feel so much and not die of it. But slowly, cell by painful cell, she began to mend. There came a time when it was no longer her whole body that burned with pain but only her heart. And then there came a time when even her heart was able, for a time at least, to feel other emotions besides grief. — Diane Setterfield

Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head. — Diane Setterfield

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

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

I read old novels. The reason is simple: I prefer proper endings. Marriages and deaths, noble sacrifices and miraculous restorations, tragic separations and unhoped-for reunions, great falls and dreams fulfilled; these, in my view, constitute an ending worth the wait. They should come after adventures, perils, dangers and dilemmas, and wind everything up nice and neatly. Endings like this are to be found more commonly in old novels than new ones, so I read old novels. — Diane Setterfield

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

They are more real than the books on the shelves, books that are sketched with the barest hint of a line here and there, fading in places to a ghostly nothingness. Why recall the picture now, you must be wondering. The reason I remember it so well is that it seems to be an image of the way I have lived my own life. I have closed my study door on the world and shut myself away with people of my imagination. — Diane Setterfield

The rook is a skilled survivor. He is ancient and has inhabited the planet longer than humans. This you can tell from his singing voice: his cry is harsh and grating, made for a more ancient world that existed before the innovation of the pipe, the lute, and the viol. Before music was invented he was taught to sing by the planet itself. He mimicked the great rumble of the sea, the fearsome eruption of volcanoes, the creaking of glaciers, and the geological groaning as the world split apart in its agony and remade itself. — Diane Setterfield

When one is nothing, one invents. It fills a void. — Diane Setterfield

Excessively narrow reading is unhelpful, certainly. Reading only Serious Literature is no better than reading only trash in this respect. — Diane Setterfield

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

But she had that laugh, and the sound of it was so beautiful that when you heard it, it was as if your eyes saw her through your ears and she was transformed. — Diane Setterfield

When you read a manuscript that has been damaged by water, fire, light or just the passing of the years, your eye needs to study not just the shape of the letters but other marks of production. The speed of the pen. The pressure of the hand on the page. Breaks and releases in the flow. You must relax. Think of nothing. Until you wake into a dream where you are at once a pen flying of vellum and the vellum itself with the touch of ink tickling your surface. Then you can read it. The intention of the writer, his thoughts, his hesitations, his longings and his meaning. You can read as clearly as if you were the very candlelight illuminating the page as the pen speeds over it. — Diane Setterfield

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

Endings that are muted, but which echo longer in the memory than louder, more explosive denouements. — Diane Setterfield

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

I pushed my pile of papers to one side, stroked Shadow and stared into the fire, longing for the comfort of a story where everything had been planned well in advance, where the confusion of the middle was invented only for my enjoyment, and where I could measure how far away the solution was by feeling the thickness of pages still to come. I had no idea how many pages it would take to complete the story of Emmeline and Adeline, nor even whether there would be time to complete it. — Diane Setterfield

We turned into the rose garden where the pruned bushes appeared as piles of dead twigs, but the elaborate borders of box that surrounded them in sinuous Elizabethan patterns twisted in and out of the moonlight, showing here silver, there black. A dozen times I would have lingered - a single ivy leaf turned at an angle to catch the moonlight perfectly; a sudden view of the great oak tree, etched with inhuman clarity against the pale sky - but I could not stop. — Diane Setterfield

A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth. — Diane Setterfield

They were like amputees, only it was not a limb they were missing, but their very souls. — Diane Setterfield

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

For it must be very lonely being dead. — Diane Setterfield

Vida Winter's appearance was not calculated for concealment. She was an ancient queen, sorceress or goddess. Her stiff figure rose regally out of a profusion of fat purple and red cushions. Draped around her shoulders, the folds of the turquoise-and-green cloth that had cloaked her body did not soften the rigidity of her frame. Her bright copper hair had been arranged into an elaborate confection of twists, curls and coils. Her face, as intricately lined as a map, was powdered white and finished with bold scarlet lipstick. In her lap, her hands were a cluster of rubies, emeralds and white, bony knuckles; only her nails, unvarnished, cut short and square like my own, struck an incongruous tone. — Diane Setterfield

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

How many times have I gone back to the border of memory and peered into the darkness beyond? But it is not only memories that hover on the border. There are all sorts of phantasmagoria that inhabit that realm. The nightmares of a lonely child. Fairy tales appropriated by a mind hungry for a story. The fantasies of an imaginative little girl anxious to explain to herself the inexplicable. Whatever story I may have discovered on the frontier of forgetting, I do not pretend to myself that is the truth. — Diane Setterfield

Life is compost. You think that a strange thing to say, but it's true. All my life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people I have known, all my memories, dreams, fantasies, everything I have ever read, all of that has been chucked onto the compost heap, where over time it had rotted down to a dark, rich, organic mulch. The process of cellular breakdown makes it unrecognizable. Other people call it the imagination. I think of it as a compost heap. Every so often I take an idea, plant it in the compost, and wait. It feeds on that black stuff that used to be a life, takes its energy for its own. It germinates. Takes root. Produces shoots. And so on and so forth, until one fine day I have a story, or a novel. — Diane Setterfield

I was in a kind of no-man's-land, a place between places. The mind plays all sorts of tricks, gets up to all kinds of things while we ourselves are slumbering in a white zone that looks for all the world like inattention to the onlooker. — Diane Setterfield

Tragedy alters everything. — Diane Setterfield

No one can hold you to a decision made in the middle of the night. — Diane Setterfield

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

I am human. Like all humans, I do not remember my birth. By the time we wake up to ourselves, we are little children, and our advent is something that happened an eternity ago, at the beginning of time. We live like latecomers to the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the begging from the shape of later events. - Vida Winter — Diane Setterfield

As for you, you are alive. But it's not the same as living. — Diane Setterfield

My liking for Scandinavian crime fiction led me into exploring literary writers from the same countries. — Diane Setterfield

I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone. — Diane Setterfield

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think of them. — Diane Setterfield

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

I shall start at the beginning. Though of coarse, the beginning is never where you think it is. — Diane Setterfield

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

My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don't expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie. — Diane Setterfield

[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

Boys do not leave their boyhood behind when they leave off their school uniform. — Diane Setterfield

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

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. — Diane Setterfield

Sometimes you can know things. Things about yourself. Things from before you can remember. — Diane Setterfield

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

Someone had told him once that the desire to do something well is a good indicator of talent. — Diane Setterfield

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

People remembered. They wept and they grieved. In the spaces between, they were glad that the leeks were doing well this year, envied the bonnet of the neighbor's cousin, relished the fragrance of pork roasting in the kitchen on Sunday. There were those that registered the beauty of a pale moon suspended behind the branches of the elms on the ridge. — Diane Setterfield

My genius is not so frail a thing that it cowers from the dirty fingers of newspapernen. — Diane Setterfield

I'd expected that I would expand to fit the experience automatically, that I would get my first glimpse of the person I was destined to be. — Diane Setterfield

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

All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes
characters even
caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you. — Diane Setterfield

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

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

His confidences, this mist, had led us unexpectedly onto a peninsula of intimacy, and I found myself on the brink of telling what I had never told anyone before. The words flew ready-formed into my head, organized themselves instantly into sentences, long strings of sentences, bursting with impatience to fly from my tongue. As if they had spent years planning for this moment. — Diane Setterfield

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

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

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

But pecuniary interest is clearly not in your nature. How quaint. I have written about people who don't care for money, but I never expected to meet one. Therefor I conclude that the difficulty concerns integrity. People whose lives are not balanced by a healthy love of money suffer from an appauling obsession with personal integrity. - Vida Winter — Diane Setterfield

In speech he stretched out his vowel sounds to give his mouth a rest before the next consonant. — Diane Setterfield

After a great many questions I eventually ascertained that he is suffering from some kind of disorder of the mind. Is there anything more sorrowful than a brain whose proper function has been disrupted? — Diane Setterfield

Without the past to cast its long shadow, might you see the future more clearly? — Diane Setterfield

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

He felt something move in his chest, as though an organ had been removed and something unfamiliar left in its place. A sentiment he had never suspected the existence of bloomed in him. It traveled from his chest along his veins to every limb. It swelled in his head, muffled his ears, stilled his voice, and collected in his feet and fingers. Having no language for it, he remained silent, but felt it root, become permanent. — Diane Setterfield

In this cruel world kindness should always be repaid. — Diane Setterfield

Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born ... Yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families 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. - Vida Winter — Diane Setterfield

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

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

One gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people. — Diane Setterfield

She had suffered longer, and she had suffered more. Each second was agony in the first weeks. She was like an amputee in the days before anesthesia, half crazed with pain, astounded that the human body could feel so much and not die of it. But slowly, cell by painful cell, she began to mend. There came a time when it was no longer her whole body that burned with pain but only her heart. And then there came a time when even her heart was able, for a time at least, to feel other emotions besides grief ... she learned how to exist apart. — Diane Setterfield

Silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. — Diane Setterfield

For nearly sixty years I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist. — Diane Setterfield

I thought you said something about a wolf' I began.
'Yes. That black beast that gnaws at my bones whenever he gets a chance. He loiters in corners and behind doors most of the time, because he's afraid of these.' She indicated the white pills on the table beside her. 'But they don't last forever. It's nearly twelve and they are wearing off. He is sniffing at my neck. By half past he will be digging his teeth and claws in. Until one, when I can take another tablet and he will have to return to his corner. We are always clockwatching, he and I. He pounces five minutes earlier every day. But I cannot take my tablets five minutes early. That stays the same. — Diane Setterfield

I've nothing against people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions. — Diane Setterfield

He didn't know of course. Not really. And yet that was what he said, and I was soothed to hear it. For I knew what he meant. 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. "I know," he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did. — Diane Setterfield

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

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

What is it that allows human beings to see through each other's pretendings? For I understood quite clearly in that moment that she was anxious. Perhaps emotions have a smell or a taste; perhaps we transmit them unknowingly by vibrations in the air. Whatever the means, I knew just as surely that it was nothing about me in particular that alarmed her, but only the fact that I had come and was a stranger. — Diane Setterfield

Rose waited for the night to bring her the same comfort. It didn't. Her mother was dead ... she was now too exhausted to sleep
and too heartbroken to weep. — Diane Setterfield

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

Why do they spend their time with cows when they are surely the more natural companions to unicorns, griffins and dragons? The answer is that the rook lives as he wishes. When he wants the entertainment of human company he is more likely to seek out the drunken poet or the wild-eyed crone than a damsel with a cornet. — Diane Setterfield

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

Every so often I take out a volume and read a page or two. After all, reading is looking after in a manner of speaking. Though they're not old enough to be valuable for their age alone, nor important enough to be sought after by collectors, my charges are dear to me, even if, as often as not, they are as dull on the inside as on the outside. No matter how banal the contents, there is always something that touches me. For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down. — Diane Setterfield

I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Books are for me, it must be said, the most important thing. — Diane Setterfield

But there can be no secrets in a house where there are children. — Diane Setterfield

He would go to the bakery for a cake, and somewhere in the shop-I had never discovered where; it was one of the few secrets I had not fathomed-he kept a candle, which came out on this day every year, was lit, and which I blew out, with as good an impression of happiness as I could muster. Then we ate the cake, with tea, and settled down to quiet digestion and cataloging. — Diane Setterfield

She could not read a book for fear of the feelings she might find in it. — Diane Setterfield

I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist. I have peeped shamelessly into hearts and bathroom closets. I have leaned over shoulders to follow the movements of quills as they write love letters, wills and confessions. I have watched as lovers love, murderers murder and children play their make-believe. Prisons and brothels have opened their doors to me; galleons and camel trains have transported me across sea and sand; centuries and continents have fallen away at my bidding. I have spied upon the misdeeds of the mighty and witnessed the nobility of the meek. I have bent so low over sleepers in their beds that they might have felt my breath on their faces. I have seen their dreams. — Diane Setterfield

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

And sometimes then he sat with us for an hour or so, sharing our limbo, listening while I read. Books from any shelf, opened at any page, in which I would start and finish anywhere, mid-sentence sometimes. Wuthering Heights ran into Emma, which gave way to The Eustace Diamonds, which faded into Hard Times, which ceded to The Woman in White. Fragments. It didn't matter. Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words, on the other hand, were a lifeline. — Diane Setterfield

People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in the ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. — Diane Setterfield