Top 280 Diane Setterfield Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 6 of 6

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

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

253. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

255. “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

256. “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

257. “To make it true? Was it for me or for her that he made these thankless efforts to connect us? It was an impossible task.”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

259. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

269. “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

270. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

272. “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

273. “El silencio donde moraban sus demonios.”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

280. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

282. “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

283. “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

284. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

286. “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

287. “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

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