Quotes from Diane Setterfield

It was laconic, but it was true. As soon as you started to put more words in, you came to unreason.

Armstrong] had found the line that separated humans from the animal kingdom to be a porous one, and all the things that people though unique to them--intelligence, kindness, communication--he had seen in his pigs, his horse, even the rooks that hopped ad strutted amongst his cows. And then there was this: the methods he used on animals generally bore fruit when applied to people too. He could usually win them round in the end.

Thomas Ambrose Proctor!

Six months ago a miraculous story had burst wildly and messily into the Swan; today it was neatened, pressed, and put away without a crease in it.

Terminado el entierro, por fin podría llorar. Pero no pude. Mi lágrimas, contenidas durante demasiado tiempo, se habían secado. Tendrían que quedarse dentro para siempre.

You leave the previous book with idea's and themes - characters even - caught in the fibers of your clothing - and when you open a new book, they are still with you.

She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it

Lo lamento -le oí decir-. Nos acostumbramos tanto a nuestros propios horrores que olvidamos el efecto que pueden tener en otras personas.

She will not be clever, but still, I see no reason why she should not one day lead a satisfying life separately from her sister. Perhaps she might even marry. All men do not seek intelligence in a wife, and Emmeline is very affectionate.

She had been able to bear not knowing a thing when she could be sure that God knew, but now...

Behind it a pile of old rags with a hat on top organized itself into a man, albeit a scruffy one, and struggled to its feet.

The parson climbed the stairs wearily back to his room. 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 bleak depths, he was somehow always unrefreshed.

The doctor knew his wife was beautiful, but they had been married too long for it to make any difference to him.

but death so rapidly undoes a person, and the detail of her face was hard to recall in any ordinary way.