Quotes from Diane Setterfield

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.

Therefore I conclude that the difficulty concerns integrity. People whose lives are not balanced by a healthy love of money suffer from an appalling obsession with personal integrity.

if you can only learn to see them. The truth had been there all along, only now had I seen

At last, after all the tale telling and all the yarn spinning, after the smoke screens and the trick mirrors and the double bluffs, I knew.

Alongside my mispronunciation of hello , good-bye and sorry in seventeen languages, and my ability to recite the Greek alphabet forward and backward (I who have never learned a word of Greek in my life), the phonetic alphabet was one of those secret, random wells of useless knowledge left over from my bookish childhood. I learned it only to amuse myself; its purpose in those days was merely private, so as the years passed I made no particular effort to practice it.

but he is a man, hence cannot see how tiresome it is to have explained at length what one has already fully understood. My

Although Mr. Montgomery must have been sixty, he had the unlined face of an infant. After forty years of practicing a poker face in the office, the muscles that twitch and tauten in response to doubt, worry, or suspicion had atrophied to the degree that it was now impossible to read any kind of expression in his face other than a general and permanent bonhomie.

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

Sapient'? Whatever is that?" " 'Tis a clever word meaning wise. Which is a thing you would know if you was sapient yourself.

silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grow pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.

when the moon hours lengthen, 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. Dreams and stories merge with lived experience, the dead and the living brush against each other in their comings and goings, the past and the present touch and overlap.

What is it that allows human beings to see through each other's pretendings? For I understood quite clearly in that moment that she was anxious. Perhaps emotions have a smell or taste; perhaps we transmit them unknowingly by vibrations in the air. Whatever the means, I knew just as surely that it was nothing about me in particular that alarmed her, but only the fact that I had come and was a stranger.

I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet 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.

the Missus stood like a ghost.

side by side, together and miles apart, we are deep in our books.

When the time was right he would run away—and be part of the story.

Oh, my poor child." I felt the touch of Miss Winter's hand on my shoulder, and while I cried over the corpses of my broken words, her hand remained there, lightly.

All children mythologize their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won't be the truth; it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.

He had given up trying to make her believe only what was true, she had been raised to the kind of religion that could admit no difference between what was true and what was good.

This was one of the images of his lifetime. He simply exposed his retina and let love burn her flickering, shimmering, absorbed face onto his soul.

Everybody has a story. It's like families. You might not know who they are, might have lost them, but they exist all the same. You might drift apart or you might turn your back on them, but you can't say you haven't got them. Same goes for stories.

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.

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

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