Quotes from Diane Setterfield

Rigid, glaring, set in a frown, his face was so much what it had been in life that the maid spoke to him three times before she realized he was dead.

William Henry Cadwalladr

and goings, and the past and the present touch and overlap. Unexpected things can happen.

The storyteller gave me a sideways look. Miss Lea, it doesn't do to get attached to these secondary characters. It's not their story. They come and go, and when they're gone, they're gone for good. That is all there is to it.

We cannot know what entering sleep feels like, for by the time it is complete the ability to register it to memory is lost. But we all know the gently plummeting feeling that precedes falling asleep and gives it its name.

Mr. Lomax had signed for Emmeline. That told me that she had survived the fire, at least. And on the second line, the name I had been hoping for. Vida Winter. And after it, in brackets, the words, formerly known as Adeline March. Proof. Vida Winter was Adeline March. She was telling the truth.

Readers,' continued Miss Winter, 'are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay.

the house picked up again its long, slow project of decay.

In summer he was a different person, sprightly and alert, and people took him for a man a decade younger than his years; but in winter he sank as the skies darkened, and by December he was always tired. When he went to bed, he drowned in sleep; when he was wakened from it, dragged from the depths , he was somehow always unrefreshed.

turquoise-and-green cloth that cloaked her body did not soften the rigidity of her frame. Her bright copper hair had been arranged into an elaborate confection of twists, curls and coils. Her face, as intricately lined as a map, was powdered white and finished with bold scarlet lipstick. In her lap, her hands were a cluster of rubies, emeralds and white, bony knuckles; only her nails, unvarnished, cut short and square like my own, struck an incongruous note.

What unnerved me more than all the rest were her sunglasses. I could not see her eyes but, as I remembered the inhuman green irises from the poster, her dark lenses seemed to develop the force of a searchlight; I had the impression that from behind them she was looking through my skin and into my very soul. I drew a veil over myself, masked myself in neutrality, hid behind my appearance.

By the time we wake up to ourselves, we are little children, and our advent is something that happened an eternity ago, at the beginning of time. We live like latecomers at the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the beginning from the shape of later events.

I was not transparent, that she could not see straight through me

Even the furniture made the most of the lack of supervision to move about.

flat brown bangs, my straight skirt and navy cardigan.

profusion of fat purple and red cushions.

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

We turned into the rose garden where the pruned bushes appeared as piles of dead twigs, but the elaborate borders of box that surrounded them in sinuous Elizabethan patterns twisted in and out of the moonlight, showing here silver, there black. A dozen times I would have lingered—a single ivy leaf turned at an angle to catch the moonlight perfectly; a sudden view of the great oak tree, etched with inhuman clarity against the pale sky—but I could not stop.

could just see the movements of Miss Winter's lashes. They crouched and quivered around the eye, like the long legs of a spider around its body.

Water, like God, moves in mysterious ways. Once inside a house, it obeys the force of gravity indirectly. Inside walls and under floors it finds secret gullies and runways; it seeps and trickles in unexpected directions; surfaces in the most unlikely places.

Politeness. Now, there's a poor man's virtue if ever there was one. What's so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After all, it's easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, 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.

I'm a storyteller." "I am a biographer.

In short, Emmeline adapted to her twin's absence. She learned how to exist apart. Yet still they reconnected and were twins again. Though Emmeline was not the same twin as before, and this was something Adeline did not immediately know.

speech he stretched out his vowel sounds to give his mouth a rest before the next consonant.