Diane Setterfield Quotes - Page 3

What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney?

Sometimes you can know things. Things about yourself. Things from before you can remember.

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

Fate, at first so amenable, so reasonable, so open to negotiation, ends up by exacting a cruel revenge for happiness.

You are suffering from an ailment that affects ladies of romantic imaginations. Symptoms include fainting, weariness, loss of appetite, low spirits. While on one level the crisis can be ascribed to wandering about in freezing rain without the benefit of adequate waterproofing, the deeper cause is more likely to be found in some emotional trauma. However, unlike the heroines of your favorite novels, your constitution has not been weakened by the privations of life in earlier, harsher centuries. No tuberculosis, no childhood polio, no unhygienic living conditions. You'll survive.' " pg. 303

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

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

To anyone who took the trouble to look, I was plainly visible, but when people are expecting to see nothing, that is usually what they see.

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.

One gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people.

Readers 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.

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

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

Politeness. Now there's a poor man's virtue if ever there was one. What's so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After all, it's easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else. People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think about them.

All children mythologise their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t be the truth: it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.

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.

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.

Of course I loved books more than people. Of course I valued "Jane Eyre" over the anonymous stranger...Of course all of Shakespeare was worth more than a human life.

There are times when the human face and body can express the yearning of the heart so accurately that you can, as they say, read them like a book. Do not abandon me.

One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else.

He didn't know of course. Not really. And yet that was what he said, and I was soothed to hear it. For I knew what he meant. We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, weight, and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all. "I know," he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.

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

I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Books are for me, it must be said, the most important thing.