Top 280 Diane Setterfield Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “But perhaps the answer is to stop writing altogether, for when I do write, even now as I write this very sentence, this very word, I am aware of a ghost reader who leans over my shoulder watching my pen, who twists my words and perverts my meaning, and makes me uncomfortable in the privacy of my own thoughts. It is very aggravating to be presented to oneself in a light so different from the familiar one, even when it is clearly a false light. I will not write any more.”

— Diane Setterfield

153. “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

154. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

157. “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

158. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

160. “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

161. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

163. “For it looked as if the walls were simply dissolving in the rain; those stones still standing, pale and insubstantial as rice paper, seemed ready to melt away under my very eyes if I just stood there long enough.”

— Diane Setterfield

164. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “To make it true? Was it for me or for her that he made these thankless efforts to connect us? It was an impossible task.”

— Diane Setterfield

179. “Why do you come here, Aurelius?”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

181. “I had wanted this, and now that it was here, I didn’t know what to make of it. I’d expected that I would expand to fit the experience automatically, that I would get my first glimpse of the person that I was destined to be. I’d expected the world to give up its child-like and familiar appearance to show me its secret, adult side. Instead, cloaked in my new independence, I felt younger than ever. Was there something wrong with me? Would I ever find out how to grow up?”

— Diane Setterfield

182. “What if the child’s dependence on her twin is so great that the separation causes a mental trauma such that the damaged mind provides solace by the creation of an imaginary twin, a fantasy companion? We arrived at no satisfactory conclusion but parted with the satisfaction of having located another area of future study: linguistics.”

— Diane Setterfield

183. “Mr. Lomax had signed for Emmeline. That told me that she had survived the fire, at least. And on the second line, the name I had been hoping for. Vida Winter. And after it, in brackets, the words, formerly known as Adeline March. Proof. Vida Winter was Adeline March. She was telling the truth.”

— Diane Setterfield

184. “The words from the letter were trapped in my head, trapped, it seemed, beneath the sloping ceiling of my attic flat, like a bird that has got in down the chimney.”

— Diane Setterfield

185. “Anyone would think you’d seen a ghost!”

— Diane Setterfield

186. “That is just a story, Jonathan.” Jonathan considered. “Like Jesus, then.” The parson frowned and was lost for words.”

— Diane Setterfield

187. “He saw her not here in this room and not now in this hour but in the infinity of memory.”

— Diane Setterfield

188. “Remember, this person burns books. Does he really deserve to live?”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

190. “Her knowledge of her own mind was what he admired about her. To expect her to bend to his wishes would be to expect her to be other than herself.”

— Diane Setterfield

191. “A few paces behind, I followed him.”

— Diane Setterfield

192. “Adeline was made like a piece of wire with knots for knees and elbows.”

— Diane Setterfield

193. “A man like me gets used to recognizing himself from the inside. The inside is what I am familiar with. Nor am I much given to studying my outward appearance in the looking glass. It is a curious thing, to see oneself in a photograph. It is a meeting with the outer man.”

— Diane Setterfield

194. “Margot was a handsome woman in her late fifties. She could lift barrels without help and had legs so sturdy, she never felt the need to sit down. It was rumored she even slept on her feet, but she had given birth to thirteen children, so clearly she must have lain down sometimes.”

— Diane Setterfield

195. “I was so preoccupied by the story I was hearing, writing, that I had no wish for anything else. My own life – such as it was – had dwindled to nothing. My daytime thoughts and my nighttime dreams were peopled by figures not from my world.”

— Diane Setterfield

196. “Her presence could be divined in any number of ways by those who had eyes to see. Yet she was not seen.”

— Diane Setterfield

197. “Then something rang a bell in his mind. What.”

— Diane Setterfield

198. “It’s what my mother would say. She thinks a weightless story is better than one that’s too heavy.” “So. My story is a heavy one.”

— Diane Setterfield

199. “Water, like God, moves in mysterious ways. Once inside a house, it obeys the force of gravity indirectly. Inside walls and under floors it finds secret gullies and runways; it seeps and trickles in unexpected directions; surfaces in the most unlikely places.”

— Diane Setterfield

200. “El silencio donde moraban sus demonios.”

— Diane Setterfield