Quotes from Diane Setterfield

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Los casos de Sherlock Holmes. Tomar diez páginas, dos veces al día, hasta finalizar el tratamiento».

I know,' he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.

A letter. For me. That was something of an event. The crisp-cornered envelope, puffed up with its thickly folded contents, was addressed in a hand that must have given the postman a certain amount of trouble.

All evidence of the house ghost reasserting herself.

She's not coming back. No. He knew it was true. He had the feeling that the world might easily stop turning without the girl in it. Every hour was arduous, and when it was over, you had to start again with a new one, no better. He wondered how long he would be able to keep it going.

I wondered. What did she think of our attempts to persuader ourselves that this was life and that we were really living it?

It doesn't do to get attached to these secondary characters. It's not their story. They come and go, and when they go, they're gone for good.

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.

Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you.

All my unsaid words went back to wherever they had been all these years.

There is something about words.

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

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.

Avete presente quando cominciate a leggere un nuovo libro prima che la membrana di quello precedente abbia avuto il tempo di richiudersi dietro di voi? Quando lasciate il vecchio libro avete idee, argomenti - perfino personaggi - impigliati nelle fibre dei vestiti e, aprendo quello nuovo, scoprite che sono ancora con voi.

At first the boys were puzzled by illness. They looked at their father from the other side of a wall of pain, bewildered that their father stood writing in his book, when he had only to reach over the division and lift them clear of it.

Everybody has a story

They sat on the bank. It was better to tell such stories close to the river than in a drawing room. Words accumulate indoors, trapped by walls and ceilings. The weight of what has been said can lie heavily on what might yet be said and suffocate it. By the river the air carries the story on a journey: one sentence drifts away and makes room for the next.

He put an arm around me, I know, he said. I know. He didn't know, of course. Not really. And yet that was what he said, and I was soothed to hear it. For I knew what he meant. We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, weight and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all. I know, he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.

Never let time be your master,' Bellman told Verney when he asked about it. 'If you want to do something, take it on. Time will always make itself.

Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole.

disregarded, by the wayside. It never failed. A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

It was like living entirely inside a book.

Half a year—maybe." "Something like that." Rita did not look away. Part of her job was to help people look at what was coming. Dying could be lonely. A nurse was often an easier person to talk to than family. She held his gaze with hers.

the wealth they had accumulated from retail needed to hide its origins, for it is well known that the purity of gold increases the further removed it is from labor.