Top 280 Diane Setterfield Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

258. “El silencio donde moraban sus demonios.”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

260. “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

261. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

264. “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

265. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

267. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

276. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

278. “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

279. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

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

— Diane Setterfield

285. “That name was Adeline March.”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

287. “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

288. “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