Top 280 Diane Setterfield Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 6

51. “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

52. “I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Books are for me, it must be said, the most important thing.”

— Diane Setterfield

53. “My mother and I were like two continents moving slowly but inexorably apart; my father, the bridge builder, constantly extending the fragile edifice he had constructed to connect us.”

— Diane Setterfield

54. “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

55. “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

56. “If you dazzle a man with green eyes, he’ll be so hypnotized that he won’t notice there is something inside the eyes spying on him.”

— Diane Setterfield

57. “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

58. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

60. “He didn’t know of course. Not really. And yet that was what he said, and I was soothed to hear it. For I knew what he meant. We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, weight, and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all. “I know,” he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.”

— Diane Setterfield

61. “One gets so used to one’s own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people.”

— Diane Setterfield

62. “L’appetit vient en mangeant. Appetite comes by eating. Your appetite will come back, but it must be met halfway. You must want it to come.”

— Diane Setterfield

63. “For one thing, the river that flows ever onwards is also seeping sideways, irrigating the fields and land to one side and the other. It finds its way into wells and is drawn up to launder petticoats and be boiled for tea. It is sucked into root membranes, travels up cell by cell to the surface, is held in the leaves of watercress.”

— Diane Setterfield

64. “It was better to tell such stories close to the river than in a drawing room. Words accumulate indoors, trapped by walls and ceilings. The weight of what has been said can lie heavily on what might yet be said and suffocate it. By the river the air carries the story on a journey: one sentence drifts away and makes way for the next.”

— Diane Setterfield

65. “Silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words.”

— Diane Setterfield

66. “Again she missed God. She had shared everything with him. From childhood she had gone to him with every question, doubt, delight, and triumph. He had accompanied every advance in her thinking; in action he had been her daily collaborator. But God was gone. This was something she was going to have to work out by herself.”

— Diane Setterfield

67. “It was like living entirely inside a book.”

— Diane Setterfield

68. “I see,” she said softly, nodding her head as though she really did. “Well, it’s your business, of course.” She turned her hand in her lap and stared into her damaged palm. “You are at liberty to say nothing, if that is what you want. But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grow pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.” Her eyes swiveled back to me. “Believe me, Margaret. I know.”

— Diane Setterfield

69. “For me to see is to read. It has always been that way.”

— Diane Setterfield

70. “Avete presente quando cominciate a leggere un nuovo libro prima che la membrana di quello precedente abbia avuto il tempo di richiudersi dietro di voi? Quando lasciate il vecchio libro avete idee, argomenti – perfino personaggi – impigliati nelle fibre dei vestiti e, aprendo quello nuovo, scoprite che sono ancora con voi.”

— Diane Setterfield

71. “Politeness. Now there’s a poor man’s virtue if ever there was one. What’s so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After all, it’s easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what’s left when you’ve failed at everything else. People with ambition don’t give a damn what other people think about them.”

— Diane Setterfield

72. “Joe the storyteller was remembered at the Swan for a long, long time. And though eventually there came a day when the man himself was forgotten, his stories lived on.”

— Diane Setterfield

73. “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.”

— Diane Setterfield

74. “Though my appetite for food grew frail, my hunger for books was constant.”

— Diane Setterfield

75. “A curtain was drawn back in every man’s inner theater and their storytelling minds got to work.”

— Diane Setterfield

76. “Her eyes were too full of beauty to leave room for anything so mundane as intelligence.”

— Diane Setterfield

77. “When one is nothing, one invents. It fills a void.”

— Diane Setterfield

78. “It doesn’t do to get attached to these secondary characters. It’s not their story. They come and go, and when they go, they’re gone for good.”

— Diane Setterfield

79. “Tragedy alters everything.”

— Diane Setterfield

80. “It was sublime – and the sublime is not to be trusted.”

— Diane Setterfield

81. “The Thames that goes north, south, east, and west, to finally go east, that seeps to one side and the other as it moves forward, that goes slow as it goes fast, that evaporates into the sky whilst meandering to the sea, is more about motion than about beginnings. If it has a beginning, it is located in a dark inaccessible place. Better study where it goes than where it comes from.”

— Diane Setterfield

82. “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.”

— Diane Setterfield

83. “Does the occurrence of one impossible thing increase the likelihood of a second.”

— Diane Setterfield

84. “A letter. For me. That was something of an event. The crisp-cornered envelope, puffed up with its thickly folded contents, was addressed in a hand that must have given the postman a certain amount of trouble.”

— Diane Setterfield

85. “A river no more begins at its source than a story begins with the first page.”

— Diane Setterfield

86. “Pigs were funny creatures. You could almost think they were human the way they looked at you sometimes. Or was the pig remembering something? Yes, she realized, that was it. The pig looked exactly as if she were recollecting some happiness now lost, so that joy remembered was overlaid with present sorrow.”

— Diane Setterfield

87. “By the time the words from the bank reached her, the thick white river mist had rinsed the urgency out of them. The words drifted into her ear, washed out and waterlogged, and sounded scarcely louder than the thoughts in her own head.”

— Diane Setterfield

88. “Rebuilt in Victorian times, it retained the modesty of its medieval origins. Small and neat, its spire indicated the direction of heaven without trying to pierce a hole in it.”

— Diane Setterfield

89. “As one tends to the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. I clean them, do minor repairs, keep them in good order. 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. 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, for it must be very lonely being dead.”

— Diane Setterfield

90. “Never let time be your master,′ Bellman told Verney when he asked about it. ‘If you want to do something, take it on. Time will always make itself.”

— Diane Setterfield

91. “Her quiet and kind listening had made it possible to speak his thoughts aloud, and sometimes it was only when he spoke his thoughts that he knew he had them. It was surprising how a man’s mind might remain half in shadow until the right confidant appeared, and Maud had been that confidant.”

— Diane Setterfield

92. “What better place to kill time than a library? And for me, what better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books?”

— Diane Setterfield

93. “Was it a miracle? It was as if they had dreamt of a pot of gold and woken to find it on their pillow. As if they had told a tale of a fairy princess and finished it only to find her sitting in a corner of the room, listening.”

— Diane Setterfield

94. “The river is of no use to a yorkshire cat, it is the moors he is looking for.”

— Diane Setterfield

95. “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.”

— Diane Setterfield

96. “He couldn’t go on. He went on.”

— Diane Setterfield

97. “They were collectors of words the same way so many of the gravel diggers were collectors of fossils. They kept an ear constantly alert for them, the rare, the unusual, the unique.”

— Diane Setterfield

98. “For it must be very lonely being dead.”

— Diane Setterfield

99. “Well, then,” the cressman concluded sagely, “just ’cause a thing’s impossible don’t mean it can’t happen.”

— Diane Setterfield

100. “Then he looked beyond the ever-shifting alteration to study the stillness of her expression. He knew his camera could not capture this – that some things were only truly seen by the human eye. This was one of the images of his lifetime. He simply exposed his retina and let love burn her flickering, shimmering, absorbed face onto his soul.”

— Diane Setterfield