Top 280 Diane Setterfield Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 4 of 6

151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “We’ve been expecting you.”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

181. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

189. “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

190. “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

191. “El silencio donde moraban sus demonios.”

— Diane Setterfield

192. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

194. “Of course one always hopes for something special when one reads an author one hasn’t read before.”

— Diane Setterfield

195. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

197. “In summer he was a different person, sprightly and alert, and people took him for a man a decade younger than his years; but in winter he sank as the skies darkened, and by December he was always tired. When he went to bed, he drowned in sleep; when he was wakened from it, dragged from the depths, he was somehow always unrefreshed.”

— Diane Setterfield

198. “That name was Adeline March.”

— Diane Setterfield

199. “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

200. “I had realized that while books are extraordinary, writers themselves are no more or less special than anyone else.”

— Diane Setterfield