Diane Setterfield

“any number of peas under the mattress and I would not know it—”

— Diane Setterfield

“Then something rang a bell in his mind. What”

— Diane Setterfield

“Remember, this person burns books. Does he really deserve to live?”

— Diane Setterfield

“Don’t you think one can tell the truth much better with a story?”

— Diane Setterfield

“followed the thread of his voice in the air.”

— Diane Setterfield

“mask of white makeup and the exotic draperies.”

— Diane Setterfield

I read *old* novels. The reason is simple. I prefer proper endings.

— Diane Setterfield

“All evidence of the house ghost reasserting herself.”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

People whose lives are not balanced by a healthy love of money suffer from an appalling obsession with personal integrity.

— Diane Setterfield

“...when people are expecting to see nothing that is usually what they see.”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

“Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating.”

— Diane Setterfield

“Miss Winter restored to me the virginal qualities of the novice reader, and then with her stories she ravished me.”

— Diane Setterfield

“The line between life and death is narrow and dark, and a bereaved twin lives closer to it than most.”

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

“Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Familes…

— Diane Setterfield

“I left wide margins. In the left-hand one I noted any mannerisms, expressions and gestures that seemed to add something to her…

— Diane Setterfield

“It gave me a queer feeling. Yesterday or the day before, while I had been going about my business, quietly and in…

— Diane Setterfield

The tears I gratified him with were fake ones. Ones that set off my green eyes the way diamonds set off emeralds.…

— Diane Setterfield

I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Books are for…

— Diane Setterfield

“I believe you,” I repeated, my tongue thick with all the waiting words. “I’ve had that feeling, too. Knowing things you can’t…

— Diane Setterfield

But she had that laugh, and the sound of it was so beautiful that when you heard it, it was as if…

— Diane Setterfield

My mother and I were like two continents moving slowly but inexorably apart; my father, the bridge builder, constantly extending the fragile…

— Diane Setterfield

“That first second was long and confusing. The second, when it finally came, was sudden. The figure froze . . . swiveled…

— Diane Setterfield

“He has described in precise, measured words the beautiful desolation he feels at the close of novels where the message is that…

— Diane Setterfield

“He would go to the bakery for a cake, and somewhere in the shop-I had never discovered where; it was one of…

— Diane Setterfield

My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared…

— Diane Setterfield

“Thinking about it now, I realize that the mark had more or less the form of a Q, but at the time,…

— Diane Setterfield

“turquoise-and-green cloth that cloaked her body did not soften the rigidity of her frame. Her bright copper hair had been arranged into…

— Diane Setterfield

“remembered the words of the man in the brown suit, and how they had echoed around the rafters of my rooms under…

— Diane Setterfield

“Everybody has a story. It’s like families. You might not know who they are, might have lost them, but they exist all…

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

But there can be no secrets in a house where there are children.

— Diane Setterfield

“tightly drawn into a mask of endurance.”

— Diane Setterfield

“I was not transparent, that she could not see straight through me,”

— Diane Setterfield

Boys do not leave their boyhood behind when they leave off their school uniform.

— Diane Setterfield

Sometimes you can know things. Things about yourself. Things from before you can remember.

— Diane Setterfield

“So much science has at its root the ability to see afresh what has been seen and thought to be understood for…

— Diane Setterfield

“To make it true? Was it for me or for her that he made these thankless efforts to connect us? It was…

— Diane Setterfield