Top 280 Diane Setterfield Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

103. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

110. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “Everybody has a story.”

— Diane Setterfield

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

126. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

128. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

133. “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

134. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

137. “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

138. “For the first time in a lifetime by the river he noticed – really noticed – that under a moonless sky the river makes its own mercurial light. Light that is also darkness, darkness that is also light.”

— Diane Setterfield

139. “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

140. “Have you got a birthday?” Aurelius asked. “Yes. I’ve got a birthday.” All my unsaid words went back to wherever they had been all these years. “I’ll make a note of it, shall I?” he said brightly. “Then I can send you a card.” I feigned a smile. “It’s coming up soon, actually. “ Aurelius opened a little blue notebook divided into months. “The nineteenth,” I told him, and he wrote it down with a pencil so small it looked like a toothpick in his huge hand.”

— Diane Setterfield

141. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

143. “Do you mean to tell me, Aurelius, that you are a foundling?” “Yes. That is the word for what I am. A foundling.”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

146. “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.”

— Diane Setterfield

147. “Margaret Lea.” “The biographer.”

— Diane Setterfield

148. “What unnerved me more than all the rest were her sunglasses. I could not see her eyes but, as I remembered the inhuman green irises from the poster, her dark lenses seemed to develop the force of a searchlight; I had the impression that from behind them she was looking through my skin and into my very soul. I drew a veil over myself, masked myself in neutrality, hid behind my appearance.”

— Diane Setterfield

149. “We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delinaments, 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

150. “He raised his head to work out whether the memory was genuine or whether it was some reverse echo by which the present seems to duplicate itself in the past.”

— Diane Setterfield