Diane Setterfield Quotes

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

I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone.

Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother, but the rest of the time there was none. This story is about one of those other times.

For me to see is to read. It has always been that way.

Of course I loved books more than people.

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

A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.

When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic, yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.

A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.

There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.

People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think of them.

As for you, you are alive. But it's not the same as living.

What better place to kill time than a library?

When one is nothing, one invents. It fills a void.

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.

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

I've nothing against people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions.

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

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

Without the past to cast its long shadow, might you see the future more clearly?

She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.

For it must be very lonely being dead.

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

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

Emmeline didn't call me anything. She didn't need, for I was always there. You only need names for the absent.

opening the book, i inhaled. the smell of old books, so sharp, so dry you can taste it.

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

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

There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner.

But there can be no secrets in a house where there are children.

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

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

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.

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

There was no single moment when I thought, Aha! What a great idea! Rather there was a slow and gradual accumulation of numerous small ideas.

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.

Prescription: 'Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. Take ten pages, twice a day, til end of course.

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.

Sometimes when you open the door to the past, what you confront is your destiny.

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.

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

I know there are people who don't read fiction at all, and I find it hard to understand how they can bear to be inside the same head all the time.

Reading can be dangerous.

In this cruel world kindness should always be repaid.

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

Tragedy alters everything.

What better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books?

A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else's story.