201 Quotes by Diane Setterfield

When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don’t expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.

She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.

In speech he stretched out his vowel sounds to give his mouth a rest before the next consonant.

Back at the Swan, the cat was asleep, curled against the chimney breast, which still exhaled a gentle warmth. Its eyelids flickered withthe images of cat dreams that would be even more perplexing to us than the stories our human brains concoct nocturnally. Its ear twitched and the dream faded instantly.

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.

People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think of them.

Her quiet and kind listening had made it possible to speak his thoughts aloud, and sometimes it was only when he spoke his thoughts that he knew he had them. It was surprising how a man’s mind might remain half in shadow until the right confidant appeared, and Maud had been that confidant.

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

It gave me a queer feeling. Yesterday or the day before, while I had been going about my business, quietly and in private, some unknown person ― some stranger ― had gone to the trouble of marking my name on this envelope.