Top 280 Diane Setterfield Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you?”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

204. “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

205. “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

206. “He was the first of my ghosts.”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

209. “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

210. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

212. “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

213. “The cat was on the window ledge, gazing intently into the garden.”

— Diane Setterfield

214. “The storyteller gave me a sideways look. “Miss Lea, it doesn’t do to get attached to these secondary characters. It’s not their story. They come and go, and when they’re gone, they’re gone for good. That is all there is to it.”

— Diane Setterfield

215. “To think a book could have so much paper in it!”

— Diane Setterfield

216. “When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled. And during this time, these 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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

221. “Oh, my poor child.” I felt the touch of Miss Winter’s hand on my shoulder, and while I cried over the corpses of my broken words, her hand remained there, lightly.”

— Diane Setterfield

222. “And is it better to know?” he asked me. “I can’t tell you. But once you know, it’s impossible to go back.”

— Diane Setterfield

223. “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

224. “Although Mr. Montgomery must have been sixty, he had the unlined face of an infant. After forty years of practicing a poker face in the office, the muscles that twitch and tauten in response to doubt, worry, or suspicion had atrophied to the degree that it was now impossible to read any kind of expression in his face other than a general and permanent bonhomie.”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

226. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

228. “We were both lone twins.”

— Diane Setterfield

229. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

232. “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

233. “Aurelius Alphonse Love.”

— Diane Setterfield

234. “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

235. “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

236. “He had given up trying to make her believe only what was true, she had been raised to the kind of religion that could admit no difference between what was true and what was good.”

— Diane Setterfield

237. “The incendiary magic she possessed was so strong she could set fire to water if she wanted to badly enough.”

— Diane Setterfield

238. “As we drove into Harrow-gate, the atmosphere in the car was heavy with Miss Winter’s oppressive silence.”

— Diane Setterfield

239. “When the time was right he would run away – and be part of the story.”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

242. “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

243. “The cat, I remember.”

— Diane Setterfield

244. “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

245. “Thinking about it now, I realize that the mark had more or less the form of a Q, but at the time, in the shock of this unexpected and painful act of revealment, it had no such clarity, and it disturbed me the way I would be disturbed by the appearance on a page of English of an unfamiliar symbol from a lost and unreadable language.”

— Diane Setterfield

246. “Someone had told him once that the desire to do something well is a good indicator of talent.”

— Diane Setterfield

247. “The past had no hold on him. Perhaps that’s why his vision of the future was so strong. Without the past to cast its long shadow, might you see the future more clearly? You.”

— Diane Setterfield

248. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

250. “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