Top 280 Diane Setterfield Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “The other rooms were thick with the corpses of suffocated words.”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

203. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

205. “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

206. “That name was Adeline March.”

— Diane Setterfield

207. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

210. “I thought nothing. The surface of my mind was perfectly still. But under the surface there was a shifting and a stirring. I felt the great swell of the undercurrent. For years a wreck had sat in the depths, a rusting vessel with its cargo of bones. Now it shifted. I had disturbed it, and it created a turbulence that lifted clouds of sand from the seabed, motes of grit swirling wildly in the dark disturbed water.”

— Diane Setterfield

211. “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

212. “I have written a number of short biographical studies of insignificant personages from literary history. My interest has always been in writing biographies of the also-rans: people who lived in the shadow of fame in their own lifetime and who, since their death, have sunk into profound obscurity.”

— Diane Setterfield

213. “There was nothing to see; the mist that hung in the air made everything invisible that was more than a short distance away.”

— Diane Setterfield

214. “When she felt the baby turn in her underwater world she remembered Quietly. The future was unfathomable, but with every heartbeat she carried her daughter towards it.”

— Diane Setterfield

215. “How horribly dull. I could never have been a biographer. Don’t you think one can tell the truth much better with a story?” “Not in the stories you have told the world so far.”

— Diane Setterfield

216. “She had been able to bear not knowing a thing when she could be sure that God knew, but now...”

— Diane Setterfield

217. “She made her resolution. In for a penny, in for a pound.”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

219. “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

220. “Death and memory are meant to work together. Sometimes something gets stuck and then people need a guide or companion in grief.”

— Diane Setterfield

221. “And during this time, those days when I read all day and half the night, when I slept under a counterpane strewn with books, when my sleep was black and dreamless and passed in a flash and I woke to read again – the lost joys of reading returned to me.”

— Diane Setterfield

222. “That he had been lucky in life and had much to be thankful for. That the woman waiting for him at home in bed was a kind and loving soul. And more: his knees didn’t hurt as much as usual, and there was an expansiveness in his chest that reminded him of how it had been to be young.”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

224. “One should always pay attention to ghosts, shouldn’t one, Miss Lea?”

— Diane Setterfield

225. “Rita knew better than most that doctors can be reluctant to admit it when they do not have the answer to a question. If no good answer presents itself, some will sooner give a bad answer than no answer at all. She did not tell Mrs. Vaughan this.”

— Diane Setterfield

226. “She stares up- and downriver in search of something. Something she longs for. Something she has been expecting every day, and every day it doesn’t come, and still she waits and still she looks and still she yearns, but the hope dwindles with every day that passes. Now she waits hopelessly.”

— Diane Setterfield

227. “Quite by chance, her talk of ghosts comes on the very day the book I am in the middle of reading has completely disappeared, only to be replaced by a novella by Henry James.”

— Diane Setterfield

228. “Then nobody spoke, and they breathed the minutes in and out till they made an hour.”

— Diane Setterfield

229. “Aurelius Alphonse Love.”

— Diane Setterfield

230. “Rigid, glaring, set in a frown, his face was so much what it had been in life that the maid spoke to him three times before she realized he was dead.”

— Diane Setterfield

231. “But there was more. Did she know I had noticed? I had made no outward sign. But I had noticed. Today Miss Winter had said I.”

— Diane Setterfield

232. “You may not want to be my son, but I cannot help but be your father.”

— Diane Setterfield

233. “They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.”

— Diane Setterfield

234. “It was odd to think that only a few years ago she had been Helena Greville. It seemed a lot longer. When she thought about that girl now it was as if she was thinking about someone she used to know, and know quite well, but would never see again. Helena Greville was gone for good.”

— Diane Setterfield

235. “I needed a lost language. One in which I could communicate with the lost.”

— Diane Setterfield

236. “He was the first of my ghosts.”

— Diane Setterfield

237. “Thomas Ambrose Proctor!”

— Diane Setterfield

238. “I can’t do nothing.” She looked at him fondly. “No. You were never any good at that.”

— Diane Setterfield

239. “A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else’s story. Take me, for instance. To look at me now, you would think my birth must have been something special, wouldn’t you? Accompanied by strange portents, and attended by witches and fairy godmothers. But no. Not a bit of it. In fact, when I was born I was no more than a sub-plot.”

— Diane Setterfield

240. “Even the furniture made the most of the lack of supervision to move about.”

— Diane Setterfield

241. “We were both lone twins.”

— Diane Setterfield

242. “My father noticed the direction of my reading. He came home from fairs and sales with books he thought might be interesting for me. Shabby little books, in manuscript mostly, yellowed pages tied with ribbon or string, sometimes hand-bound. I devoured them. Though my appetite for food grew frail, my hunger for books was constant.”

— Diane Setterfield

243. “What makes it noteworthy is that a striking coincidence has made it a cleverer trick than they could have known. For the book is a rather silly story about a governess and two haunted children. I am afraid that in it Mr. James exposes the extent of his ignorance. He knows little about children and nothing at all about governesses.”

— Diane Setterfield

244. “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

245. “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

246. “William Henry Cadwalladr.”

— Diane Setterfield

247. “It was Hester herself, made word.”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

250. “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