Top 280 Diane Setterfield Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “I needed a lost language. One in which I could communicate with the lost.”

— Diane Setterfield

152. “Margaret Lea.” “The biographer.”

— Diane Setterfield

153. “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

154. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

157. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

169. “Thomas Ambrose Proctor!”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

171. “Gone were her fiery orange and resplendent purple. She was dressed in a white long-sleeved chemise, and she was weeping.”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

173. “Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t be the truth; it will be a story.”

— Diane Setterfield

174. “I left wide margins. In the left-hand one I noted any mannerisms, expressions and gestures that seemed to add something to her meaning. The right-hand margin I left blank. Later, rereading, it was here that I would enter my own thoughts, comments, questions.”

— Diane Setterfield

175. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

178. “Usually the walk home from the Swan was a time for regret – regret that his joints ached so badly, that he had drunk too much, that the best of life had passed him by and he had only aches and pains ahead of him now, a gradual decline till at the end he would sink into the grave.”

— Diane Setterfield

179. “Pigs are remarkable creatures and, though most men are too blind to see it, have intelligence that they show in their eyes.”

— Diane Setterfield

180. “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

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. “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

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. 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? What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.”

— Diane Setterfield

187. “Helena was very quiet these days. She seemed pleased about the baby, talked from time to time about plans for their lives to come, but her liveliness had gone. Future life and past losses coexisted in her, two halves of a single experience, and she bore her grief and her hope in a subdued manner.”

— Diane Setterfield

188. “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

189. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

194. “I believe you,” I repeated, my tongue thick with all the waiting words. “I’ve had that feeling, too. Knowing things you can’t know. From before you can remember.” And there it was again! A sudden movement in the corner of my eye, there and gone in the same instant.”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

196. “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

197. “William Henry Cadwalladr.”

— Diane Setterfield

198. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield