Diane Setterfield quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Diane Setterfield

Diane Setterfield Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Diane Setterfield on Wise Famous Quotes.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Writing is more about discovery than invention.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Of course I loved books more than people.

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

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

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

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

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

Tragedy alters everything.

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

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

And is it better to know?" he asked me.
"I can't tell you. But once you know, it's impossible to go back.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Life is compost.

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

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

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

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.

Though my appetite for food grew frail, my hunger for books was constant.

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

In this cruel world kindness should always be repaid.

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

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

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

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

For it must be very lonely being dead.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

What better place to kill time than a library?

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

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

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

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

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

Reading can be dangerous.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

She was a do-gooder,

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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