Quotes from Diane Setterfield

There are times when the human face and body can express the yearning of the heart so accurately that you can, as they say, read them like a book.

Don't you think one can tell the truth much better with a story?

Just what kind of a person are you, Miss Lea?" I fixed my mask in place before replying

It was odd to think that only a few years ago she had been Helena Greville. It seemed a lot longer. When she thought about that girl now it was as if she was thinking about someone she used to know, and know quite well, but would never see again. Helena Greville was gone for good.

A few paces behind, I followed him.

do you believe in ghosts?

I have written a number of short biographical studies of insignificant personages from literary history. My interest has always been in writing biographies of the also-rans: people who lived in the shadow of fame in their own lifetime and who, since their death, have sunk into profound obscurity.

Imagine the time it would take if every aspect of experience had to be scrutinized afresh every minute of every day. No; in order to free ourselves from the mundane it is essential that we delegate much of our interpretation of the world to that lower area of the mind that deals with the presumed, the assumed, the probable.

But there was more. Did she know I had noticed? I had made no outward sign. But I had noticed. Today Miss Winter had said I.

copper curls turned. I was stunned. The glasses were gone. Green eyes, bright as glass and as real

It was Hester herself, made word.

And will you tell me the truth?" "I will tell you the truth.

The words from the letter were trapped in my head, trapped, it seemed, beneath the sloping ceiling of my attic flat, like a bird that has got in down the chimney.

I will ask you three things. Things that are a matter of public record. When I leave here, I will be able to check what you tell me. If I find you have told me the truth about them, I will accept the commission." "Ah, the rule of three . . . The magic number.

That name was Adeline March.

she could not be less than seventy-three or -four, and to judge by her appearance, altered though it was by illness and makeup, she could be no more than eighty.

There are cultures in which it is believed that a name contains all a person's mystical power. That a name should be known only to God and to the person who holds it and to very few privileged others. To pronounce such a name, either one's own or someone else's, is to invite jeopardy. This, it seemed, was such a name.

And everyday I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head. Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so. For it must be very lonely being dead.

mask of white makeup and the exotic draperies.

Gone were her fiery orange and resplendent purple. She was dressed in a white long-sleeved chemise, and she was weeping.

We were both lone twins.

is to marvel that the randomness of human variation can produce something so supernaturally perfect as this.

Thinking about it now, I realize that the mark had more or less the form of a Q, but at the time, in the shock of this unexpected and painful act of revealment, it had no such clarity, and it disturbed me the way I would be disturbed by the appearance on a page of English of an unfamiliar symbol from a lost and unreadable language.

El silencio no es el entorno natural para las historias -me dijo en una ocasión la señorita Winter-. Las historias necesitan palabras. Sin ellas palidecen, enferman y mueren. Y luego te persiguen.