Diane Setterfield Quotes

Miss Lea, it does not do to get attached to these secondary characters It's not their story. They come, they go, and when they go they're gone for good. That's all there is to it.

My words flew like birds into a pane of glass.

Not even a ghost could survive here.

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.

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

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 tha...

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 Iwas born…Yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string that ca...

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 ever...

Quite by chance, her talk of ghosts comes on the very day the book I am in the middle of reading has completely disappeared, only to be replaced by a novella by Henry James.

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...

Remember, this person burns books. Does he really deserve to live?

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

She's not coming back.No. He knew it was true. He had the feeling that the world might easily stop turning without the girl in it. Every hour was arduous, and when it was over, you had to start again...

The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours.

The key that sits in the lock, unused since the days of Hester, is hot. It burns my palm as I turn it.

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 tha...

Then something rang a bell in his mind. What

There are stories that may be told aloud, and stories that must be told in whispers, and there are stories that are never told at all. The story of the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong was one of th...

There was no magic behind the silence - it was the soft-furnishings that did it. Overstuffed sofas were piled with velvet cushions; there were upholstered footstools, chaise longues, and armchairs; ta...

There’s a great many things hard to fathom in darkness that set themselves straight in the light of day.