Quotes from Diane Setterfield

Kita semua memiliki kesedihan kita sendiri, dan walaupun kontur, bobot, serta dimensinya berbeda-beda bagi setiap orang, warna kesedihan adalah sama bagi kita semua.

When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don't expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.

His confidences, this mist, had led us unexpectedly onto a peninsula of intimacy, and I found myself on the brink of telling what I had never told anyone before. The words flew ready-formed into my head, organized themselves instantly into sentences, long strings of sentences, bursting with impatience to fly from my tongue. As if they had spent years planning for this moment.

He felt something move in his chest, as though an organ had been removed and something unfamiliar left in its place. A sentiment he had never suspected the existence of bloomed in him. It traveled from his chest along his veins to every limb. It swelled in his head, muffled his ears, stilled his voice, and collected in his feet and fingers. Having no language for it, he remained silent, but felt it root, become permanent.

Silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words.

My story - my own personal story - ended before my writing began. Storytelling has only ever been a way of filling in the time since everything finished.

Todos los niños mitifican su nacimiento. Es un rasgo universal. ¿Quieres conocer a alguien? ¿Su corazón, su mente, su alma? Pídele que te hable de cuando nació. Lo que te cuente no será la verdad: será una historia. Y nada es tan revelador como una historia. Vida Winter, Cuentos de cambio y desesperación.

Of course I recognized it. How could I not, for I had read it goodness knows how many times. 'Jane Eyre,' I said wonderingly. 'You recognized it? Yes, it is. I asked a man in a library. It's by Charlotte someone. She had a lot of sisters, apparently.

It gave me a queer feeling. Yesterday or the day before, while I had been going about my business, quietly and in private, some unknown person ? some stranger ? had gone to the trouble of marking my name on this envelope.

Rebuilt in Victorian times, it retained the modesty of its medieval origins. Small and neat, its spire indicated the direction of heaven without trying to pierce a hole in it.

but he is a man, hence cannot see how tiresome it is to have explained at length what one has already fully understood.

Something happens and then something else happens and then all sorts of other things happen, expected and unexpected, unusual and ordinary.

She was a woman who let life happen to her without troubling her mind about things more than was necessary.

There are cultures in which it is believed that a name contains all a persons 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 ones own or someone else's is to invite jeopardy. This it seemed was such a name.

I made a resolution to telephone my mother the next day, but it was a safe resolution; no one can hold you to a decision made in middle of the night.And then my spine sent me an alarm. A presence. Here. Now. At my side.

It was not the sun, but the moonlight that shimmered in the garden, edging the leaves with silver and touching the outlines of the statuary figures.

He has explained why it is that ambiguity touches his heart more nearly than the death and marriage style of finish that i prefer.

Tributaries A river on a map is a simple thing. Our river starts at Trewsbury Mead, and follows a course of some two hundred and thirty-six miles to reach the sea at Shoeburyness. But anyone who takes the trouble to follow its route, whether by boat or on foot, cannot help being aware that, furlong by furlong, singleness of direction is not its most obvious feature. En route the river does not seem particularly intent on reaching its destination. Instead it winds its way

Her eyes were too full of beauty to leave room for anything so mundane as intelligence.

Las palabras tienen algo especial. En manos expertas, manipuladas con destreza, nos convierten en sus prisioneros. Se enredan en nuestros brazos como tela de araña y en cuanto estamos tan embelesados que no podemos movernos, nos perforan la piel, se infiltran en la sangre, adormecen el pensamiento. Y ya dentro de nosotros ejercen su magia.

I'd expected that I would expand to fit the experience automatically, that I would get my first glimpse of the person I was destined to be.

Again she missed God. She had shared everything with him. From childhood she had gone to him with every question, doubt, delight, and triumph. He had accompanied every advance in her thinking; in action he had been her daily collaborator. But God was gone. This was something she was going to have to work out by herself.

No matter how banal the contents, there is always something that touches me. For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down.

Un nacimiento no es, en realidad, una introducción. Nuestra vida, cuando empieza, no es realmente nuestra, sino la continuación de la historia de otro.