Quotes from Susan Hill

I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence once lost, is lost forever.

I do not believe I have ever again slept so well as I did that night in the inn at Crythin Gifford. For I see that then I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence, once lost, is lost forever.

I was frightened of myself, I seemed to have no control over my thoughts and feelings, it was like a sort of madness...

I would act, pretend, and the pretense would become real.

A book which is left on a shelf is a dead thing but it is also a chrysalis, an inanimate object packed with the potential to burst into new life.

Deep under the earth, inside its cardboard coffin, shrouded in the layers of white paper, the china doll with the jagged open crevasse in its skull was crying.

the past still held secrets, the past threw its shadows...

I was forced to live through it all, every minute and then every day thereafter...

and I shivered as I thought once again how inexpressibly sad it was that the ending of a whole human life, from birth and childhood, through adult maturity to extreme old age, should here be marked by no blood relative or heart's friend, but only by two men connected by nothing more than business, one of whom had never so much as set eyes upon the woman during her life, besides those present in an even more bleakly professional capacity.

It's fine. I hardly think about it now. It's long gone. Yet there is sometimes the shadow of a shadow, and when that happens I wonder if it could come back. And I don't know, because I don't know what caused it in the first place. My ohysche was turned inside out and shaken, but they never got to the bottom of why.

I had been right, this was just the sort of place where superstition and tittle-tattle were rife, and even allowed to hold sway over commonsense. Now

It is okay to climb as long as you are not afraid, because being afraid is what made you fall

We have a friend, and Anglophile American city-dweller in his eighties, whose main ambition, now, is to hear a cuckoo call, for he never has, and perhaps he never will, for he is rather deaf. But, if he came and sat under the magic apple tree for an afternoon in May, it would be quiet enough, and then he might listen to the cuckoo-cuckoo-cuckoo until he had his fill.

They asked for my story. I have told it. Enough.

Johann carefully wrote the letters J J—short for Jesu, Juva, or "Jesus, Help"—at the top of the page. With that, the music began to pour from his soul and onto the page. When he was finally satisfied, he wrote the letters SDG at the bottom of the page. These letters stood for Soli Deo Gloria—"for the glory of God alone." His prayer was that whenever the music was played, it would point toward God.

A gunman is terrorising young women. What links the attacks? Is the marksman with a rifle the same person as the killer with a handgun or do the police have two snipers on their hands? BOOK 5: THE SHADOWS IN

For I must confess I had the Londoner's sense of superiority in those days, the half-formed belief that countrymen, and particularly those who inhabited the remoter corners of our island, were more superstitious, more gullible, more slow-witted, unsophisticated and primitive, than we cosmopolitans.

Sometimes a book has its day and, although of course it does not change, the reader does, as a result of having read better things, or new tastes having come to the fore, or fashions in literature having moved on. Other novels seem to have improved, usually because we have matured as readers, our imaginations have expanded and we understand new literary approaches, sometimes because of life events which have opened us up to a new emotional awareness and understanding.

I have had too much personal evidence of the presence of the dead, too many clear hints of a glorious after-life, to ignore. I would not make these up to comfort myself but they are an inexpressible consolation in the face of death. Would I deny them in the face of the sneers and jeers of others? If I did, I would be untrue to myself and my own experiences. I respect the unbelief of others. They should respect my faith.

You try so hard to shield me, and protect me, and really, there is no need, you try so hard to hide what you want, how you feel, and of course you can't.

A good reader pays attention to everything. The surface of the prose. The structure of the book. The tense. The point of view. Perhaps to those even before the characters. Then comes the setting. The story can often come last.

I always wait until at least a year after any of the prizes before reading those on the lists which appeal. It is amazing how everything settles down and finds its natural level. Hype never did any reader much good.

Your world may think what it chooses...but really, opinion and gossip count for nothing at all against truth...

How many selves do we contain, like Russian dolls concealed within one another.