Top 280 Diane Setterfield Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Death did not frighten her. In those years she had tended the dying, witnessed their demise, and laid out the dead. Death by sickness. Death in childbirth. Death by accident. Death by malice, once or twice. Death as the welcome visitor to great age.”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

153. “Though children are capable of great cruelty. Only we do not like to think it of them.”

— Diane Setterfield

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “William Henry Cadwalladr.”

— Diane Setterfield

161. “Not even a ghost could survive here.”

— Diane Setterfield

162. “Thomas Ambrose Proctor!”

— Diane Setterfield

163. “I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book.”

— Diane Setterfield

164. “Let me spell it out for you. When a man’s got something he don’t give tuppence about and another man wants it enough, thruppence will usually do it.”

— Diane Setterfield

165. “They were not willfully cruel, you know. Only foolish. Misguided by their learning, their ambition, their own self-deceiving blindness.”

— Diane Setterfield

166. “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

167. “The other rooms were thick with the corpses of suffocated words.”

— Diane Setterfield

168. “I did not see the wolf when he came. I did not hear him. There was only this: A little before dawn I became aware of a hush, and I realized that the only breathing to be heard in the room was my own.”

— Diane Setterfield

169. “When there is no light to see by, any drunk can walk in a straight line!”

— Diane Setterfield

170. “No hay una vieja casa que no tenga sus historias; no existe una vieja casa que no tenga sus fantasmas.”

— Diane Setterfield

171. “Emmeline and Adeline. Unmistakable. Two manes of red hair, two pairs of black shoes; one child in the navy poplin that the Missus had put Emmeline in that morning, the other in green.”

— Diane Setterfield

172. “Once you said a thing, it could never be taken back and would be taken up and repeated and altered and told again, no matter how misshapen and out of true. Better to say nothing.”

— Diane Setterfield

173. “Half a year – maybe.” “Something like that.” Rita did not look away. Part of her job was to help people look at what was coming. Dying could be lonely. A nurse was often an easier person to talk to than family. She held his gaze with hers.”

— Diane Setterfield

174. “The steps were flanked by a pair of low pedestals, on which were mounted two giant cats carved out of some dark, polished material. The undulations of their anatomy were so persuasively carved that, running my fingers over one, I half expected fur, was startled by the cool hardness of the stone.”

— Diane Setterfield

175. “But you know it was here? In this house?” Aurelius shoved his hands into the depths of his pockets. His shoulders tightened. “I wouldn’t expect other people to understand. I haven’t got any proof. But I do know.” He sent me a quick glance, and I encouraged him, with my eyes, to continue. “Sometimes you can know things. Things about yourself. Things from before you can remember. I can’t explain it.”

— Diane Setterfield

176. “We cannot know what entering sleep feels like, for by the time it is complete the ability to register it to memory is lost. But we all know the gently plummeting feeling that precedes falling asleep and gives it its name.”

— Diane Setterfield

177. “Death might be a necessity in farming, but suffering? Never.”

— Diane Setterfield

178. “Six months ago a miraculous story had burst wildly and messily into the Swan; today it was neatened, pressed, and put away without a crease in it.”

— Diane Setterfield

179. “What is it that allows human beings to see through each other’s pretendings? For I understood quite clearly in that moment that she was anxious. Perhaps emotions have a smell or a taste; perhaps we transmit them unknowingly by vibrations in the air. Whatever the means, I knew just as surely that it was nothing about me in particular that alarmed her, but only the fact that I had come and was a stranger.”

— Diane Setterfield

180. “The key that sits in the lock, unused since the days of Hester, is hot. It burns my palm as I turn it.”

— Diane Setterfield

181. “I felt a strange sensation inside. Like the past coming to life. The watery stirring of a previous life turning in my belly, creating a tide that rose in my veins and sent cool wavelets to lap at my temples. The ghastly excitement of it.”

— Diane Setterfield

182. “There were some for whom the world was such a tricky thing that they marvelled at it without feeling any need to puzzle it out.”

— Diane Setterfield

183. “Time was of the essence. For at eight o’clock the world came to an end. It was reading time.”

— Diane Setterfield

184. “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

185. “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

186. “Her hair was a dirty color that was too dark to be blond, her chin was big and her eyes were small.”

— Diane Setterfield

187. “One of the first keys to success, he considered, was to recognize the difference between problems you could do something about and problems you could do nothing about.”

— Diane Setterfield

188. “He knows what reading is. How it takes you.”

— Diane Setterfield

189. “We turned into the rose garden where the pruned bushes appeared as piles of dead twigs, but the elaborate borders of box that surrounded them in sinuous Elizabethan patterns twisted in and out of the moonlight, showing here silver, there black. A dozen times I would have lingered – a single ivy leaf turned at an angle to catch the moonlight perfectly; a sudden view of the great oak tree, etched with inhuman clarity against the pale sky – but I could not stop.”

— Diane Setterfield

190. “The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours.”

— Diane Setterfield

191. “Rita did not look away. Part of her job was to help people face what was coming. Dying could be lonely. A nurse was often easier to talk to than family.”

— Diane Setterfield

192. “Upstairs I peered into the bathroom mirror. It was for reassurance, to see what I looked like as a grown-up girl. Head tilted to the left, then to the right, I studied my reflection from all angles, willing myself to see someone different. But it was only me looking back at my myself.”

— Diane Setterfield

193. “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

194. “So tell me about yourself. What are your favourite books? What do you dream about? Whom do you love?”

— Diane Setterfield

195. “That name was Adeline March.”

— Diane Setterfield

196. “Moments came back to him when he had behaved less honorably than he wished. He remembered instances of neglect and ingratitude. He felt the pang of remorse and resolved not to do the same again.”

— Diane Setterfield

197. “I was at a loss to explain to myself the bitterness of my disappointment.”

— Diane Setterfield

198. “Lily was no great reader. She could not tell b from d and all the letters quivered on the page as soon as they felt the brush of her gaze; but when her mother read aloud in her gentle voice, the lines settled and she found she could follow the thread after all, mouthing the words silently in time. Sometimes.”

— Diane Setterfield

199. “Wait!” he said. “Hold your scolding till you know what I have come to tell you!”

— Diane Setterfield

200. “As is well known, when the moon hours lenghten, human beings come adrift from the regularity of their mechanical clocks. They nod at noon, dream in waking hours, open their eyes wide to the pitch-black night. It is a time of magic. And as the borders between night and day stretch to their thinnest, so too do the borders between worlds.”

— Diane Setterfield