What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? Diane Setterfield More Quotes by Diane Setterfield More Quotes From 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 writingbloodmoving 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 stagereadingjoy For me to see is to read. It has always been that way. Diane Setterfield way My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don't expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie. Diane Setterfield wallrunninglying A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic. Diane Setterfield significancecasesstories A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth. Diane Setterfield piecesbrokenstories 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 silencestoriesneeds I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone. Diane Setterfield reality 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 nostalgicbookchildren There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere. Diane Setterfield linesbookworld Of course I loved books more than people. Diane Setterfield coursesbookpeople When one is nothing, one invents. It fills a void. Diane Setterfield void Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head. Diane Setterfield icelawbook What better place to kill time than a library? Diane Setterfield librarybetter-place 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 continuationbirthstories In this cruel world kindness should always be repaid. Diane Setterfield shouldkindnessworld 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. And yet 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. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Diane Setterfield believebookchildren As for you, you are alive. But it's not the same as living. Diane Setterfield alive 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 lightreadingbook 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 readingmorningbook
