Quotes from Diane Setterfield

The funeral was over, at last I could cry. Except that I couldn't. My tears, kept in too long, had fossilized. They would have to stay in forever now.

And sometimes then he sat with us for an hour or so, sharing our limbo, listening while I read. Books from any shelf, opened at any page, in which I would start and finish anywhere, mid-sentence sometimes. Wuthering Heights ran into Emma, which gave way to The Eustace Diamonds, which faded into Hard Times, which ceded to The Woman in White. Fragments. It didn't matter. Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words, on the other hand, were a lifeline.

A river no more begins at its source than a story begins with the first page.

They were collectors of words the same way so many of the gravel diggers were collectors of fossils. They kept an ear constantly alert for them, the rare, the unusual, the unique.

My genius is not so frail a thing that it cowers from the dirty fingers of newspapernen.

Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words on the other hand, were a lifeline. They left their hushed rhythm behind, a counter to the slow in and out of Emmeline's breathing.

when people are expecting to see nothing that is usually what they see.

Then he looked beyond the ever-shifting alteration to study the stillness of her expression. He knew his camera could not capture this - that some things were only truly seen by the human eye. This was one of the images of his lifetime. He simply exposed his retina and let love burn her flickering, shimmering, absorbed face onto his soul.

There must be more to stories than you think.

People whose lives are not balanced by a healthy love of money suffer from an appalling obsession with personal integrity.

The tears I gratified him with were fake ones. Ones that set off my green eyes the way diamonds set off emeralds. And it worked. If you dazzled a man with green eyes, he will be so hypnotized that he won't notice there is someone inside the eyes spying on him. – Vida Winters Page 268

Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating.

She could not read a book for fear of the feelings she might find in it.

I shall start at the beginning. Though of course, the beginning is never where you think it is.

I read *old* novels. The reason is simple. I prefer proper endings.

Along the borders of this world lie others. There are places you can cross. This is one such place.

I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. 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. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same.

Boys do not leave their boyhood behind when they leave off their school uniform.

Ordinary people, untwins, seek their soulmate, take lovers, marry. Tormented by their incompleteness they strive to be part of a pair.

There are few things that cannot be put right by love, and there is no shortage of that here.

Reading had never let me down before. It had always been the one sure thing.

As one tends to the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. I clean them, do minor repairs, keep them in good order. And every day 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.

Well, then," the cressman concluded sagely, "just 'cause a thing's impossible don't mean it can't happen.

A child is not an empty vessel.... to be formed in whatever way the parent thinks fit. They are born with their own hearts and they cannot be made otherwise, no matter what love a man lavishes on them.