Top 280 Diane Setterfield Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “Shirley goes over the edge.” “I don’t like games like this.” “Now George Sand starts to go up in flames.” I sighed and closed my eyes. “Wuthering Heights.”

— Diane Setterfield

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “Don’t you think one can tell the truth much better with a story?”

— Diane Setterfield

257. “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

258. “By the time we wake up to ourselves, we are little children, and our advent is something that happened an eternity ago, at the beginning of time. We live like latecomers at the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the beginning from the shape of later events.”

— Diane Setterfield

259. “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

260. “Things were happening that were beyond her comprehension. More and more often these days, and for longer and longer periods, she had the sense that something had gone wrong with the world. More than once she seemed to wake up in her head and find that whole hours had passed by without leaving a trace in her memory. Things that clearly made sense to other people didn’t always make sense to her.”

— Diane Setterfield

261. “The cat, I remember.”

— Diane Setterfield

262. “He knows what reading is. How it takes you.”

— Diane Setterfield

263. “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

264. “We turned into the rose garden where the pruned bushes appeared as piles of dead twigs, but the elaborate borders of box that surrounded them in sinuous Elizabethan patterns twisted in and out of the moonlight, showing here silver, there black. A dozen times I would have lingered – a single ivy leaf turned at an angle to catch the moonlight perfectly; a sudden view of the great oak tree, etched with inhuman clarity against the pale sky – but I could not stop.”

— Diane Setterfield

265. “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

266. “The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours.”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

268. “Rita did not look away. Part of her job was to help people face what was coming. Dying could be lonely. A nurse was often easier to talk to than family.”

— Diane Setterfield

269. “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

270. “Upstairs I peered into the bathroom mirror. It was for reassurance, to see what I looked like as a grown-up girl. Head tilted to the left, then to the right, I studied my reflection from all angles, willing myself to see someone different. But it was only me looking back at my myself.”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

272. “All the grief I had kept at bay for years by means of books and bookcases approached me now.”

— Diane Setterfield

273. “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

274. “And will you tell me the truth?” “I will tell you the truth.”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

279. “So much science has at its root the ability to see afresh what has been seen and thought to be understood for centuries.”

— Diane Setterfield

280. “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

281. “He has described in precise, measured words the beautiful desolation he feels at the close of novels where the message is that there is no end to human suffering, only endurance. He has spoken of endings that are muted, but which echo longer in the memory than louder, more explosive denouements. He has explained why it is that ambiguity touches his heart more nearly than the death and marriage style of finish that I prefer.”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

283. “Just what kind of a person are you, Miss Lea?” I fixed my mask in place before replying.”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

285. “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

286. “Imagine the time it would take if every aspect of experience had to be scrutinized afresh every minute of every day. No; in order to free ourselves from the mundane it is essential that we delegate much of our interpretation of the world to that lower area of the mind that deals with the presumed, the assumed, the probable.”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

288. “It felt as if everything had come to an end. I had only one wish: to sit like John, immobile, staring into space and doing nothing. Yet time did not stop. I could still feel my heartbeat measuring out the seconds. I could feel hunger growing in my stomach, and thirst in my throat. I was so sad I thought I would die, yet instead I was scandalously and absurdly alive – so alive I swear I could feel my hair and fingernails growing.”

— Diane Setterfield