Quotes from Diane Setterfield

Not even a ghost could survive here.

Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won't be the truth; it will be a story.

stood with my hand on the handle of the third door. The rule of three, Miss Winter had said. But I wasn't in the mood for her story anymore. Her dangerous house with its indoor rain and trick mirror had lost its interest for me.

Aurelius Alphonse Love.

turn all the mirrors to the wall.

Emmeline and Adeline. Unmistakable. Two manes of red hair, two pairs of black shoes; one child in the navy poplin that the Missus had put Emmeline in that morning, the other in green.

Margot was a handsome woman in her late fifties. She could lift barrels without help and had legs so sturdy, she never felt the need to sit down. It was rumored she even slept on her feet, but she had given birth to thirteen children, so clearly she must have lain down sometimes.

All the grief I had kept at bay for years by means of books and bookcases approached me now.

There was no rational explanation for what she had seen. It was unscientific. And Hester knew the world was totally and profoundly scientific. There could be only one explanation. "I must be mad," she whispered. Her pupils dilated and her nostrils quivered. "I have seen a ghost!

So tell me about yourself. What are your favourite books? What do you dream about? Whom do you love?

Margaret Lea." "The biographer.

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.

How horribly dull. I could never have been a biographer. Don't you think one can tell the truth much better with a story?" "Not in the stories you have told the world so far.

We've been expecting you.

Usually the walk home from the Swan was a time for regret—regret that his joints ached so badly, that he had drunk too much, that the best of life had passed him by and he had only aches and pains ahead of him now, a gradual decline till at the end he would sink into the grave.

Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born…Yet that is not so. 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.

To make it true? Was it for me or for her that he made these thankless efforts to connect us? It was an impossible task.

It's what my mother would say. She thinks a weightless story is better than one that's too heavy." "So. My story is a heavy one.

I needed a lost language. One in which I could communicate with the lost.

And is it better to know?" he asked me. "I can't tell you. But once you know, it's impossible to go back.

The incendiary magic she possessed was so strong she could set fire to water if she wanted to badly enough.

Her knowledge of her own mind was what he admired about her. To expect her to bend to his wishes would be to expect her to be other than herself.

Back at the Swan, the cat was asleep, curled against the chimney breast, which still exhaled a gentle warmth. Its eyelids flickered with the images of cat dreams that would be even more perplexing to us than the stories our human brains concoct nocturnally. Its ear twitched and the dream faded instantly.

There are stories that may be told aloud, and stories that must be told in whispers, and there are stories that are never told at all. The story of the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong was one of these latter ones, known only to the two parties to whom it belonged and the river. But as secret visitors to this world, as border crossers between one world and another, there is nothing to prevent us sitting by the river and opening our ears; then we will know it too.