Quotes from Diane Setterfield

Readers, continued Miss Winter, are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay. That's why I couldn't have journalists and biographers rummaging around in my past, retrieving bits and pieces of it, preserving it in their words. To write my books, I needed my past left in peace, for time to do its work.

I pushed my pile of papers to one side, stroked Shadow and stared into the fire, longing for the comfort of a story where everything had been planned well in advance, where the confusion of the middle was invented only for my enjoyment, and where I could measure how far away the solution was by feeling the thickness of pages still to come. I had no idea how many pages it would take to complete the story of Emmeline and Adeline, nor even whether there would be time to complete it.

Rose waited for the night to bring her the same comfort. It didn't. Her mother was dead...she was now too exhausted to sleep -- and too heartbroken to weep.

Miss Lea, it doesn't do to get attached to these secondary characters. It's not their story.

For nearly sixty years I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist.

Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes – characters even – caught in the fibres of your clothes, and when you open the new book they are still with you.

Seventeen years being neither a very short nor a very long time, Phillip was remembered and misremembered in equal measure.

They] took it upon themselves to start the laborious process of cranking up life again, after death has stopped us all in its tracks.

Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born... Yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole.

And my own feelings? Shame. For I had lied. Of course I loved books more than people. Of course I valued Jane Eyre over the anonymous stranger with his hand on the lever. Of course all of Shakespeare was worth more than a human life. Of course. Unlike Miss Winter, I had been ashamed to say so.

endings that are muted, but which echo longer in the memory than louder, more explosive denouements.

Tú estás viva; pero estar viva no es lo mismo que vivir.

What is it that allows human beings to see through each other's pretendings? For I understood quite clearly in that moment that she was anxious. Perhaps emotions have a smell or a taste; perhaps we transmit them unknowingly by vibrations in the air. Whatever the means, I knew just as surely that it was nothing about me in particular that alarmed her, but only the fact that I had come and was a stranger.

My words flew like birds into a pane of glass.

Todos tenemos nuestros dolores, y aunque la forma, el peso y las dimensiones del dolor son diferentes para cada persona, el color del dolor es común a todos nosotros.

There were some for whom the world was such a tricky thing that they marvelled at it without feeling any need to puzzle it out.

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.

One of the best ways of avoiding his torments was to be ignorant about something and let him put you straight.

Kita hidup seperti penonton yang datang terlambat ke bioskop: kita harus mengejar ketertinggalan sebaik-baiknya, menebak permulaan dari bentuk peristiwa-peristiwa lanjutannya.

Death and memory are meant to work together. Sometimes something gets stuck and then people need a guide or companion in grief.

Miss Winter restored to me the virginal qualities of the novice reader, and then with her stories she ravished me.

the price they must pay for escaping their destiny.

ten years of marriage is usually enough to cure marital affection, but Angelfield was an odd fellow, and there it was.

She was too old to be young and other women her age had been crossed off the list of women suitable for appraisal