Quotes from Diane Setterfield

My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.

earl, his mother a black servant girl—had brought

Moments came back to him when he had behaved less honorably than he wished. He remembered instances of neglect and ingratitude. He felt the pang of remorse and resolved not to do the same again.

for on a summer day winter always seems like something you have dreamt or heard spoken of and not a thing you have lived.

myself, I found that my thoughts had been rearranged in my absence.

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. So," she concluded, "everybody has a story. When are you going to tell me yours?" "I'm not.

No hay una vieja casa que no tenga sus historias; no existe una vieja casa que no tenga sus fantasmas.

They were not willfully cruel, you know. Only foolish. Misguided by their learning, their ambition, their own self-deceiving blindness.

She stares up- and downriver in search of something. Something she longs for. Something she has been expecting every day, and every day it doesn't come, and still she waits and still she looks and still she yearns, but the hope dwindles with every day that passes. Now she waits hopelessly.

remembered the gray cat that had appeared, as if by magic, on her lap. Silently he had sat under her stroking hand, regarding me fixedly with his round yellow eyes. If he saw my ghosts, if he saw my secrets, he did not seem the least perturbed, but only blinked and continued to stare indifferently. "What's his name?" I had asked. "Shadow," she absently replied.

its feet had been in water, but the cushions were sound. The red rug could not make up its mind whether to float or sink; every motion of the water caused it to shift with weighty indecision.

The river is of no use to a yorkshire cat, it is the moors he is looking for.

He didn't know, of course. Not really. And yet that was what he said and I was soothed to hear it. For I knew what he meant. We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, the weight and the dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the colour of grief is common to us all. 'I know,' he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.

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

I did not see the wolf when he came. I did not hear him. There was only this: A little before dawn I became aware of a hush, and I realized that the only breathing to be heard in the room was my own.

Someone had told him once that the desire to do something well is a good indicator of talent.

Death did not frighten her. In those years she had tended the dying, witnessed their demise, and laid out the dead. Death by sickness. Death in childbirth. Death by accident. Death by malice, once or twice. Death as the welcome visitor to great age.

Since we are on the topic of ravens, a collective noun for ravens is an unkindness. This is somewhat puzzling to Thought and Memory.

I felt a strange sensation inside. Like the past coming to life. The watery stirring of a previous life turning in my belly, creating a tide that rose in my veins and sent cool wavelets to lap at my temples. The ghastly excitement of it.

And now, dear reader, the story is over. It is time for you to cross the bridge once more and return to the world you came from. This river, which is and is not the Thames, must continue flowing without you. You have haunted here long enough, and besides, surely you have rivers of your own to attend to?

The past had no hold on him. Perhaps that's why his vision of the future was so strong. Without the past to cast its long shadow, might you see the future more clearly? You

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.

Though children are capable of great cruelty. Only we do not like to think it of them.

One of the first keys to success, he considered, was to recognize the difference between problems you could do something about and problems you could do nothing about.