201 Quotes by Diane Setterfield

I see,” she said softly, nodding her head as though she really did. “Well, it’s your business, of course.” She turned her hand in her lap and stared into her damaged palm. “You are at liberty to say nothing, if that is what you want. But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grow pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.” Her eyes swiveled back to me. “Believe me, Margaret. I know.

They were like amputees, only it was not a limb they were missing, but their very souls.

We live like latecomers to the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the begging from the shape of later events.

She was a woman who let life happen to her without troubling her mind about things more than was necessary.

A letter. For me. That was something of an event. The crisp-cornered envelope, puffed up with its thickly folded contents, was addressed in a hand that must have given the postman a certain amount of trouble.

He couldn’t go on. He went on.

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.

Perhaps it didn’t matter, I told myself. Who was there to miss me? No one would suffer from my going. That was a blessing.

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