Setterfield Diane Quotes & Sayings

We are made of the stories we have heard and read all through our lives. — Diane Setterfield

Sometimes when you open the door to the past, what you confront is your destiny. — Diane Setterfield

There are cultures in which it is believed that a name contains all a persons mystical power. That a name should be known only to God and to the person who holds it and to very few privileged others. To pronounce such a name either ones own or someone else's is to invite jeopardy. This it seemed was such a name. — Diane Setterfield

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

Of course I loved books more than people. — Diane Setterfield

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My mother says that after I first visited the home of the man I later married, she knew it was serious when I told her, 'Mum, he has more books than me!' So, books are at the very heart of my life. — Diane Setterfield

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And everyday I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head. 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? — Diane Setterfield

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

Opening the book, i inhaled. the smell of old books, so sharp, so dry you can taste it. — Diane Setterfield

Writing is more about discovery than invention. — 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

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

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

Her eyes were too full of beauty to leave room for anything so mundane as intelligence. — Diane Setterfield

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

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

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

[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

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

She was a do-gooder, — 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

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. — Diane Setterfield

Readers," continued Miss Winter, "are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay. That's why I couldn't have journalists and biographers rummaging around in my past, retrieving bits and pieces of it, preserving it in their words. To write my books, I needed my past left in peace, for time to do its work. — 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

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

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

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

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

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. And yet 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. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. 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. — Diane Setterfield

Peasants and princes, bailiffs and bakers' boys, merchants and mermaids, the figures were all immediately familiar. I had read these stories a hundred, a thousand, times before. They were stories everyone knew. But gradually, as I read, their familiarity fell away from them. They became strange. They became new. These characters were not the colored manikins I remembered from my childhood picture books, mechanically acting out the story one more time. They were people ... The stories were shot through with an unfamiliar mood. Everyone achieved their heart's desire ... 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. — 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

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

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

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

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

Still in my coat and hat, I sank onto the stair to read the letter. (I never read without making sure I am in a secure position. I have been like this ever since the age of seven when, sitting on a high wall and reading The Water Babies, I was so seduced by the descriptions of underwater life that I unconsciously relaxed my muscles. Instead of being held buoyant by the water that so vividly surrounded me in my mind, I plummeted to the ground and knocked myself out. I can still feel the scar under my fringe now. Reading can be dangerous.) — 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

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

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

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

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

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

My father never put a book into my hands and never forbade a book. Instead, he let me roam and graze, making my own more or less appropriate selections. I read gory tales of historic heroism that nine-teenth century parents were suitable for children, and gothic ghost stories that were surely not; I read accounts of arduous travel through treacherous lands undertaken by spinsters in crinolines, and I read handbooks on decorum and etiquette intended for young ladies of good family; I read books with pictures and books without; books in English, books in French, books in languages I didn't understand where I could make up stories in my head on the basis of a handful of guessed-at words. Books. Books. And books. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was no single moment when I thought, Aha! What a great idea! Rather there was a slow and gradual accumulation of numerous small ideas. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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