201 Quotes by Diane Setterfield

Then he looked beyond the ever-shifting alteration to study the stillness of her expression. He knew his camera could not capture this – that some things were only truly seen by the human eye. This was one of the images of his lifetime. He simply exposed his retina and let love burn her flickering, shimmering, absorbed face onto his soul.

L’appetit vient en mangeant. Appetite comes by eating. Your appetite will come back, but it must be met halfway. You must want it to come.

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.

And now, dear reader, the story is over. It is time for you to cross the bridge once more and return to the world you came from. This river, which is and is not the Thames, must continue flowing without you. You have haunted here long enough, and besides, you surely have rivers of your own to attend to?

Her eyes were too full of beauty to leave room for anything so mundane as intelligence.

By the time the words from the bank reached her, the thick white river mist had rinsed the urgency out of them. The words drifted into her ear, washed out and waterlogged, and sounded scarcely louder than the thoughts in her own head.

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.

All my unsaid words went back to wherever they had been all these years.

Along the borders of this world lie others. There are places you can cross. This is one such place.