Diane Setterfield Quotes

78 quotes in 1198 categories

• There was no single moment when I thought, Aha! What a great idea! Rather there was a slow and gradual accumulation of numerous small ideas.
• People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think of them.
• 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…
• Readers are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time…
• I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Books are for me, it must…
• There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you…
• She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.
• 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.
• 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…
• The doctor's wife wasn't a bad woman. She was sufficiently convinced of her own importance to believe that God actually did watch everything she did…
• Of course I loved books more than people.
• When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic, yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It…
• One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else.
• 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…
• When one is nothing, one invents. It fills a void.
• All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when…
• 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…
• 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?…
• 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.
• What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney?

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