Top 280 Diane Setterfield Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Tributaries A river on a map is a simple thing. Our river starts at Trewsbury Mead, and follows a course of some two hundred and thirty-six miles to reach the sea at Shoeburyness. But anyone who takes the trouble to follow its route, whether by boat or on foot, cannot help being aware that, furlong by furlong, singleness of direction is not its most obvious feature. En route the river does not seem particularly intent on reaching its destination. Instead it winds its way.”

— Diane Setterfield

102. “An unrested mind is prone to wander into unfruitful avenues; it is nothing that a good night’s sleep cannot cure.”

— Diane Setterfield

103. “There must be more to stories than you think.”

— Diane Setterfield

104. “Politeness. Being nice is what’s left when you’ve failed at everything else.”

— Diane Setterfield

105. “The events of six months ago seemed very distant now, for on a summer day winter always seems like something you have dreamt or heard spoken of and not a thing you have lived.”

— Diane Setterfield

106. “They are more real than the books on the shelves, books that are sketched with the barest hint of a line here and there, fading in places to a ghostly nothingness. Why recall the picture now, you must be wondering. The reason I remember it so well is that it seems to be an image of the way I have lived my own life. I have closed my study door on the world and shut myself away with people of my imagination.”

— Diane Setterfield

107. “Reading had never let me down before. It had always been the one sure thing.”

— Diane Setterfield

108. “All evidence of the house ghost reasserting herself.”

— Diane Setterfield

109. “They were like amputees, only it was not a limb they were missing, but their very souls.”

— Diane Setterfield

110. “They stood in silence, looking at floorboards and corners of cornices and other such insignificances, their curiosity and compassion at the ready. They were waiting so hard that when the door cracked and Bellman appeared, they jumped.”

— Diane Setterfield

111. “For at eight o’clock the world came to an end. It was reading time. The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours.”

— Diane Setterfield

112. “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.”

— Diane Setterfield

113. “He would go to the bakery for a cake, and somewhere in the shop-I had never discovered where; it was one of the few secrets I had not fathomed-he kept a candle, which came out on this day every year, was lit, and which I blew out, with as good an impression of happiness as I could muster. Then we ate the cake, with tea, and settled down to quiet digestion and cataloging.”

— Diane Setterfield

114. “Perhaps it didn’t matter, I told myself. Who was there to miss me? No one would suffer from my going. That was a blessing.”

— Diane Setterfield

115. “After a great many questions I eventually ascertained that he is suffering from some kind of disorder of the mind. Is there anything more sorrowful than a brain whose proper function has been disrupted?”

— Diane Setterfield

116. “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

117. “But she had that laugh, and the sound of it was so beautiful that when you heard it, it was as if your eyes saw her through your ears and she was transformed.”

— Diane Setterfield

118. “Everybody has a story.”

— Diane Setterfield

119. “I looked out into the dead garden. Against the fading light, my shadow hovered in the glass, looking into the dead room. What did she make of us? I wondered. What did she think of our attempts to persuade ourselves that this was life and that we were really living it?”

— Diane Setterfield

120. “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

121. “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

122. “I hardly suppose Wagner lost sleep worrying whether he’d hurt someone’s feelings. But then he was a genius.”

— Diane Setterfield

123. “Any governess, after the few hours I have had in this house, would have a full and clear picture of the task awaiting her, but he is a man, hence cannot see how tiresome it is to have explained at length what one has already fully understood.”

— Diane Setterfield

124. “The end of my nine o’clocks was another anchor in time gone.”

— Diane Setterfield

125. “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

126. “One of the best ways of avoiding his torments was to be ignorant about something and let him put you straight.”

— Diane Setterfield

127. “My words flew like birds into a pane of glass.”

— Diane Setterfield

128. “Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you.”

— Diane Setterfield

129. “And my own feelings? Shame. For I had lied. Of course I loved books more than people. Of course I valued Jane Eyre over the anonymous stranger with his hand on the lever. Of course all of Shakespeare was worth more than a human life. Of course. Unlike Miss Winter, I had been ashamed to say so.”

— Diane Setterfield

130. “I know,′ he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.”

— Diane Setterfield

131. “Behind it a pile of old rags with a hat on top organized itself into a man, albeit a scruffy one, and struggled to its feet.”

— Diane Setterfield

132. “She was a woman who let life happen to her without troubling her mind about things more than was necessary.”

— Diane Setterfield

133. “All my unsaid words went back to wherever they had been all these years.”

— Diane Setterfield

134. “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?”

— Diane Setterfield

135. “The rhythm of the train on the tracks suggested words to his overtired brain and he heard them as clearly as if an unseen person had pronounced them: Something is going to happen.”

— Diane Setterfield

136. “Therefore I conclude that the difficulty concerns integrity. People whose lives are not balanced by a healthy love of money suffer from an appalling obsession with personal integrity.”

— Diane Setterfield

137. “They think I am concealing my ugliness from them, when in truth it is their ugliness I am hiding.”

— Diane Setterfield

138. “At last, after all the tale telling and all the yarn spinning, after the smoke screens and the trick mirrors and the double bluffs, I knew.”

— Diane Setterfield

139. “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

140. “There’s a great many things hard to fathom in darkness that set themselves straight in the light of day.”

— Diane Setterfield

141. “The mist was almost gone. The magical shapes of the topiary had lost their charm and looked like the unkempt bushes and hedges they were.”

— Diane Setterfield

142. “In short, Emmeline adapted to her twin’s absence. She learned how to exist apart. Yet still they reconnected and were twins again. Though Emmeline was not the same twin as before, and this was something Adeline did not immediately know.”

— Diane Setterfield

143. “There was no rational explanation for what she had seen. It was unscientific. And Hester knew the world was totally and profoundly scientific. There could be only one explanation. “I must be mad,” she whispered. Her pupils dilated and her nostrils quivered. “I have seen a ghost!”

— Diane Setterfield

144. “In speech he stretched out his vowel sounds to give his mouth a rest before the next consonant.”

— Diane Setterfield

145. “It was laconic, but it was true. As soon as you started to put more words in, you came to unreason.”

— Diane Setterfield

146. “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. The story of the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong was one of these latter ones, known only to the two parties to whom it belonged and the river. But as secret visitors to this world, as border crossers between one world and another, there is nothing to prevent us sitting by the river and opening our ears; then we will know it too.”

— Diane Setterfield

147. “I’m a storyteller.” “I am a biographer.”

— Diane Setterfield

148. “What’s the value of happiness that can only come at the price of another person’s despair?”

— Diane Setterfield

149. “We had reached tipping point. It was no longer possible to call it a demolition site. Tomorrow, today perhaps, the workers would return and it would become a construction site. The past demolished, it was time for them to start building the future.”

— Diane Setterfield

150. “Margaret Lea.” “The biographer.”

— Diane Setterfield