Quotes from Diane Setterfield

any number of peas under the mattress and I would not know it—

remember pondering for a long time over a dish of scrambled egg. What did it mean? It could mean anything. I ate a few mouthfuls and pushed the plate away. In this long, undifferentiated lapse of time, there were a few incidents that stood out. I noted them at the time, separately from the story, and they are worth recalling here.

Jane Eyre. Villette. The Woman in White." "Middlemarch

rare, and as the household descended from eccentricity into chaos

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

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

He raised his head to work out whether the memory was genuine or whether it was some reverse echo by which the present seems to duplicate itself in the past.

For me, to see is to read. It has always been that way.

As is well known, when the moon hours lenghten, human beings come adrift from the regularity of their mechanical clocks. They nod at noon, dream in waking hours, open their eyes wide to the pitch-black night. It is a time of magic. And as the borders between night and day stretch to their thinnest, so too do the borders between worlds.

Remember, this person burns books. Does he really deserve to live?

being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else. People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think about them.

Quite by chance, her talk of ghosts comes on the very day the book I am in the middle of reading has completely disappeared, only to be replaced by a novella by Henry James.

What makes it noteworthy is that a striking coincidence has made it a cleverer trick than they could have known. For the book is a rather silly story about a governess and two haunted children. I am afraid that in it Mr. James exposes the extent of his ignorance. He knows little about children and nothing at all about governesses

We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, the weight and the dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the colour of grief is common to us all. 'I know,' he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.

but I have come to see that when two people work closely together on a joint project—two intelligent people, I mean to say—a bond of communication develops between them that can enhance their work. All the while they are jointly engaged on a task, they are aware of, acutely sensitive to, each other's tiniest movements, and can interpret them accordingly.

Cogí la receta. Con letra enérgica, había escrito: «Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Los casos de Sherlock Holmes. Tomar diez páginas, dos veces al día, hasta finalizar el tratamiento».

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.

but I have come to see that when two people work closely together on a joint project—two intelligent people, I mean to say—a bond of communication develops between them that can enhance their work.

the joys of coauthoring a research paper, it is really time to go to bed.

I had realized that while books are extraordinary, writers themselves are no more or less special than anyone else.

holding up a single picture and studying it with a frown. She's seen a ghost

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.

But perhaps the answer is to stop writing altogether, for when I do write, even now as I write this very sentence, this very word, I am aware of a ghost reader who leans over my shoulder watching my pen, who twists my words and perverts my meaning, and makes me uncomfortable in the privacy of my own thoughts. It is very aggravating to be presented to oneself in a light so different from the familiar one, even when it is clearly a false light. I will not write any more.

The cat, I remember.