201 Quotes by Diane Setterfield

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.

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

All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. 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 fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.

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

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.

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

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.

Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head.

Reading had never let me down before. It had always been the one sure thing.