201 Quotes by Diane Setterfield

"Though my appetite for food grew frail, my hunger for books was constant."

"I am human. Like all humans, I do not remember my birth. By the time we wake up to ourselves, we are little children, and our advent is something that happened an eternity ago, at the beginning of time. We live like latecomers to the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the begging from the shape of later events. - Vida Winter"

"All children mythologise their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t be the truth: it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story."

"My genius is not so frail a thing that it cowers from the dirty fingers of newspapernen."

"When one is nothing, one invents. It fills a void."

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

"I've nothing against people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions."

"But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you."

"He would go to the bakery for a cake, and somewhere in the shop-I had never discovered where; it was one of the few secrets I had not fathomed-he kept a candle, which came out on this day every year, was lit, and which I blew out, with as good an impression of happiness as I could muster. Then we ate the cake, with tea, and settled down to quiet digestion and cataloging."

"It was better to tell such stories close to the river than in a drawing room. Words accumulate indoors, trapped by walls and ceilings. The weight of what has been said can lie heavily on what might yet be said and suffocate it. By the river the air carries the story on a journey: one sentence drifts away and makes way for the next."