201 Quotes by Diane Setterfield

There are stories that may be told aloud, and stories that must be told in whispers, and there are stories that are never told at all.

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

Something happens and then something else happens and then all sorts of other things happen, expected and unexpected, unusual and ordinary.

A child is not an empty vessel... to be formed in whatever way the parent thinks fit. They are born with their own hearts and they cannot be made otherwise, no matter what love a man lavishes on them.

And my own feelings? Shame. For I had lied. Of course I loved books more than people. Of course I valued Jane Eyre over the anonymous stranger with his hand on the lever. Of course all of Shakespeare was worth more than a human life. Of course. Unlike Miss Winter, I had been ashamed to say so.

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.

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

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.

Well, then,” the cressman concluded sagely, “just ’cause a thing’s impossible don’t mean it can’t happen.