Diane Setterfield Quotes

48 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diane Setterfield