Diane Setterfield Quotes

48 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Diane Setterfield
Politeness. Now there's a poor man's virtue if ever there was one. What's so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After all, it's easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else. People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think about them.

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

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
The tears I gratified him with were fake ones. Ones that set off my green eyes the way diamonds set off emeralds. And it worked. If you dazzled a man with green eyes, he will be so hypnotized that he won't notice there is someone inside the eyes spying on him.

Diane Setterfield
I read *old* novels. The reason is simple. I prefer proper endings.

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
One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else.

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

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
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

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

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
Of course I loved books more than people. Of course I valued "Jane Eyre" over the anonymous stranger...Of course all of Shakespeare was worth more than a human life.

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

Diane Setterfield