When one is nothing, one invents. It fills a void. Diane Setterfield More Quotes by Diane Setterfield More Quotes From 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 bodyheartbook Without the past to cast its long shadow, might you see the future more clearly? Diane Setterfield shadowlongpast I read *old* novels. The reason is simple. I prefer proper endings. Diane Setterfield novelsimplereason Boys do not leave their boyhood behind when they leave off their school uniform. Diane Setterfield uniformsboysschool And sometimes then he sat with us for an hour or so, sharing our limbo, listening while I read. Books from any shelf, opened at any page, in which I would start and finish anywhere, mid-sentence sometimes. Wuthering Heights ran into Emma, which gave way to The Eustace Diamonds, which faded into Hard Times, which ceded to The Woman in White. Fragments. It didn't matter. Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words, on the other hand, were a lifeline. Diane Setterfield hard-timesbookart Our clients' faces, with the customary outward paleness and inner glow of the book lover. Diane Setterfield clientsfacesbook Every so often I take out a volume and read a page or two. After all, reading is looking after in a manner of speaking. Though they're not old enough to be valuable for their age alone, nor important enough to be sought after by collectors, my charges are dear to me, even if, as often as not, they are as dull on the inside as on the outside. No matter how banal the contents, there is always something that touches me. For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down. Diane Setterfield readingwritingtwo opening the book, i inhaled. the smell of old books, so sharp, so dry you can taste it. Diane Setterfield smelldrybook 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.) Diane Setterfield wallreadingbaby 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 bearspeoplefiction I've nothing against people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions. Diane Setterfield factsdullpeople What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? Diane Setterfield midnightdarkwind 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 eventswinterchildren 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 talentniceneeds 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. Diane Setterfield takenmeanbelieve 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. Diane Setterfield soulheartchildren Reading can be dangerous. Diane Setterfield dangerousreading One gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people. Diane Setterfield horrorforgetpeople Sometimes you can know things. Things about yourself. Things from before you can remember. Diane Setterfield about-yourselfremembersometimes 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. – Vida Winters Page 268 Diane Setterfield eyewintermen
