Top 83 Quotes & Sayings by Diane Setterfield - Page 2

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.)

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.

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

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

The doctor's wife wasn't a bad woman. She was sufficiently convinced of her own importance to believe that God actually did watch everything she did and listen to everything she said, and she was too taken up with rooting out the pride she was prone to feeling in her own holiness to notice any other failings she might have had. She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.

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.

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.

For it must be very lonely being dead.

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

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

Reading can be dangerous.

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

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

There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner.

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

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

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