Top 280 Diane Setterfield Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Diane Setterfield

2. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

4. “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

5. “Of course I loved books more than people.”

— Diane Setterfield

6. “We’ve been expecting you.”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

8. “A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.”

— Diane Setterfield

9. “There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.”

— Diane Setterfield

Featured in: Reading Quotes

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

— Diane Setterfield

11. “Reading can be dangerous.”

— Diane Setterfield

12. “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

13. “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

14. “The laws of life and death, as she had learned them, were incomplete. There was more to life, more to death, than medical science had known.”

— Diane Setterfield

15. “Along the borders of this world lie others. There are places you can cross. This is one such place.”

— Diane Setterfield

16. “As for you, you are alive. But it’s not the same as living.”

— Diane Setterfield

17. “Readers 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 nourish a work of fiction. it must be allowed to decay.”

— Diane Setterfield

18. “What better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books?”

— Diane Setterfield

19. “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

20. “We live like latecomers to the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the begging from the shape of later events.”

— Diane Setterfield

21. “Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Familes 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.”

— Diane Setterfield

22. “What better place to kill time than a library?”

— Diane Setterfield

23. “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

24. “Don’t be so polite. If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s politeness.”

— Diane Setterfield

25. “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

26. “In this cruel world kindness should always be repaid.”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

28. “Kita semua memiliki kesedihan kita sendiri, dan walaupun kontur, bobot, serta dimensinya berbeda-beda bagi setiap orang, warna kesedihan adalah sama bagi kita semua.”

— Diane Setterfield

29. “A child is not an empty vessel... to be formed in whatever way the parent thinks fit. They are born with their own hearts and they cannot be made otherwise, no matter what love a man lavishes on them.”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

31. “Kita hidup seperti penonton yang datang terlambat ke bioskop: kita harus mengejar ketertinggalan sebaik-baiknya, menebak permulaan dari bentuk peristiwa-peristiwa lanjutannya.”

— Diane Setterfield

32. “People whose lives are not balanced by a healthy love of money suffer from an appalling obsession with personal integrity.”

— Diane Setterfield

33. “Boys do not leave their boyhood behind when they leave off their school uniform.”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

36. “Fate, at first so amenable, so reasonable, so open to negotiation, ends up by exacting a cruel revenge for happiness.”

— Diane Setterfield

37. “People with ambition don’t give a damn what other people think of them.”

— Diane Setterfield

38. “Emmeline didn’t call me anything. She didn’t need, for I was always there. You only need names for the absent.”

— Diane Setterfield

39. “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.”

— Diane Setterfield

40. “I don’t pretend reality is the same for everyone.”

— Diane Setterfield

41. “I’ve nothing against people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions.”

— Diane Setterfield

42. “Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother, but the rest of the time there was none. This story is about one of those other times.”

— Diane Setterfield

43. “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

44. “There is something about words.”

— Diane Setterfield

45. “Something happens and then something else happens and then all sorts of other things happen, expected and unexpected, unusual and ordinary.”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

47. “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

48. “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.”

— Diane Setterfield

49. “And now, dear reader, the story is over. It is time for you to cross the bridge once more and return to the world you came from. This river, which is and is not the Thames, must continue flowing without you. You have haunted here long enough, and besides, you surely have rivers of your own to attend to?”

— Diane Setterfield

50. “There are few things that cannot be put right by love, and there is no shortage of that here.”

— Diane Setterfield