Quotes from Diane Setterfield

The cat was on the window ledge, gazing intently into the garden.

Don't be so polite. If there's one thing I can't abide, it's politeness.

Las historias necesitan palabras. Sin ellas palidecen, enferman y mueren. Y luego te persiguen.

Emmeline didn't call me anything. She didn't need to, for I was always there. You only need names for the absent.

There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic. When I at last woke up to myself, I could only guess what had been going on in the darkness of my unconsciousness.

tightly drawn into a mask of endurance.

as though if I looked hard enough, there would be revealed in the grain or the watermark of the paper itself the elucidation of the mystery.

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 a 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.

We had reached tipping point. It was no longer possible to call it a demolition site. Tomorrow, today perhaps, the workers would return and it would become a construction site. The past demolished, it was time for them to start building the future.

know what it is like to finish a book and find oneself wondering, a day or a week later, what happened to the butcher or who got the diamonds, or whether or not the dowager was ever reconciled with her niece. I

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.

a single lupine exhalation could reduce it to rubble.

He knows what reading is. How it takes you.

remembered the words of the man in the brown suit, and how they had echoed around the rafters of my rooms under the eaves. Yet the man in the brown suit was a figment of her imagination. I should have expected it. She was a spinner of yarns, wasn't she? A storyteller. A fabulist. A liar. And the plea that had so moved me—Tell me the truth—had been uttered by a man who was not even real. I was at a loss to explain to myself the bitterness of my disappointment.

that. I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life

Then something rang a bell in his mind. What

Let me spell it out for you. When a man's got something he don't give tuppence about and another man wants it enough, thruppence will usually do it.

The other rooms were thick with the corpses of suffocated words.

A story so cherished it had to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.

She made her resolution. In for a penny, in for a pound.

Miss Lea, it does not do to get attached to these secondary characters It's not their story. They come, they go, and when they go they're gone for good. That's all there is to it.

my hunger for books was constant.

The key that sits in the lock, unused since the days of Hester, is hot. It burns my palm as I turn it.

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.