Quotes from Diane Setterfield

My mother and I were like two continents moving slowly but inexorably apart; my father, the bridge builder, constantly extending the fragile edifice he had constructed to connect us.

For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down.

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

I looked out into the dead garden. Against the fading light, my shadow hovered in the glass, looking into the dead room. What did she make of us? I wondered. What did she think of our attempts to persuade ourselves that this was life and that we were really living it?

It was sublime—and the sublime is not to be trusted.

I reached for the prescription. In a vigorous scrawl, he inked: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. Take ten pages, twice a day, till end of course.

In the background is the hiss of the gas heater; we hear the sound without hearing it for, side by side, together and miles apart, we are deep in our books.

For at eight o'clock the world came to an end. It was reading time. The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours. Against the blue candlewick bedspread the white pages of my open book, illuminated by a circle of lamplight, were the gateway to another world.

Our clients' faces, with the customary outward paleness and inner glow of the book lover.

He couldn't go on. He went on.

My study throngs with characters waiting to be written. Imaginary people, anxious for a life, who tug at my sleeve, crying, 'Me next! Go on! My turn!' I have to select. And once I have chosen, the others lie quiet for ten months or a year, until I come to the end of the story, and the clamor starts up again.

For one thing, the river that flows ever onwards is also seeping sideways, irrigating the fields and land to one side and the other. It finds its way into wells and is drawn up to launder petticoats and be boiled for tea. It is sucked into root membranes, travels up cell by cell to the surface, is held in the leaves of watercress

A curtain was drawn back in every man's inner theater and their storytelling minds got to work.

Joe the storyteller was remembered at the Swan for a long, long time. And though eventually there came a day when the man himself was forgotten, his stories lived on.

The line between life and death is narrow and dark, and a bereaved twin lives closer to it than most.

The doctor's wife wasn't a bad woman. She was sufficiently convinced of her own importance to believe that God actually did watch everything she did and listen to everything she said, and she was too taken up with rooting out the pride she was prone to feeling in her own holiness to notice any other failings she might have had. She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.

People remembered. They wept and they grieved. In the spaces between, they were glad that the leeks were doing well this year, envied the bonnet of the neighbor's cousin, relished the fragrance of pork roasting in the kitchen on Sunday. There were those that registered the beauty of a pale moon suspended behind the branches of the elms on the ridge.

But only when it was too late did they realize the price they must pay for escaping their destiny. Every Happy Ever After was tainted. Fate, at first so amenable, so reasonable, so open to negotiation, ends up by exacting a cruel revenge for happiness.

on those days when he could not spend half an hour in the company of a good book, he felt deprived.

Though my appetite for food grew frail, my hunger for books was constant.

Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words, on the other hand, were a lifeline.

L'appetit vient en mangeant. Appetite comes by eating. Your appetite will come back, but it must be met halfway. You must want it to come.

Time was of the essence. For at eight o'clock the world came to an end. It was reading time. The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours. Against the blue candlewick bedspread the white pages of my open book, illuminated by a circle of lamplight, were the gateway to another world.

People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist.