Diane Setterfield Quotes

But she had that laugh, and the sound of it was so beautiful that when you heard it, it was as if your eyes saw her through your ears and she was transformed.

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

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

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.

The imagination is a healthy thing, and a great many scientific discoveries could not have been made without it, but it need to be harnessed to some serious object if it is to come to anything.

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

Politeness. Being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else.

In speech he stretched out his vowel sounds to give his mouth a rest before the next consonant.

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.

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

No one can hold you to a decision made in the middle of the night.

You leave the previous book with idea's and themes - characters even - caught in the fibers of your clothing - and when you open a new book, they are still with you.

You have to relax, write what you write. It sounds easy but it's really, really hard. One of the things it took me longest to learn was to trust the writing process.