Quotes by Diane Setterfield

About Diane Setterfield:

Diane Setterfield is a British author whose 2006 debut novel, The Thirteenth Tale, became a New York Times No. 1 best-seller. It is written in the Gothic tradition, with echoes of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Her debut novel was turned into a television film.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Diane Setterfield

Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Familes are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a se...

Diane Setterfield

I have closed my study door on the world and shut myself away with people of my imagination. For nearly sixty years I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist. I have peeped shamelessly into hearts and bathroom closets....

Diane Setterfield

...but he is a man, hence cannot see how tiresome it is to have explained at length what one has already fully understood.

Diane Setterfield

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

Diane Setterfield

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

Diane Setterfield

She had not had the relief of amnesia. She had suffered longer, and she had suffered more. Each second was agony in the first weeks. She was like an amputee in the days before anesthesia, half crazed with pain, astounded that the human body could fee...

Diane Setterfield

We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delinaments, 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.

Diane Setterfield

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

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.

Diane Setterfield

Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born...Yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and la...

Diane Setterfield

How many times have I gone back to the border of memory and peered into the darkness beyond? But it is not only memories that hover on the border. There are all sorts of phantasmagoria that inhabit that realm. The nightmares of a lonely child. Fairy ...

Diane Setterfield

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

Diane Setterfield

For me to see is to read. It has always been that way.

Diane Setterfield

Still in my coat and hat, I sank onto the stair to read the letter. (I never read without making sure I am in a secure position. I have been like this ever since the age of seven when, sitting on a high wall and reading The Water Babies, I was so sed...

Diane Setterfield

When you read a manuscript that has been damaged by water, fire, light or just the passing of the years, your eye needs to study not just the shape of the letters but other marks of production. The speed of the pen. The pressure of the hand on the pa...

Diane Setterfield

People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation...

Diane Setterfield

My father never put a book into my hands and never forbade a book. Instead, he let me roam and graze, making my own more or less appropriate selections. I read gory tales of historic heroism that nine-teenth century parents were suitable for children...

Diane Setterfield

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.

Diane Setterfield

My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightni...

Diane Setterfield

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

Diane Setterfield

Author Bio

  • NameDiane Setterfield
  • DescriptionEnglish novelist
  • BornAugust 22, 1964
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionWoman Of Letters