Quote by Diane Setterfield

““The night I was found there was a big fire here. Mrs. Love told me so, when I was nine. She thought she should, because of the smell of smoke on my clothes when she found me. Later I came over to have a look. And I’ve been coming ever since. Later I looked it up in the archives of the local paper. Anyway—” His voice had the unmistakable lightness of someone telling something extremely important. A story so cherished it had to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.””

Diane Setterfield

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More by Diane Setterfield

“They are more real than the books on the shelves, books that are sketched with the barest hint of a line here and there, fading in places to a ghostly nothingness. Why recall the picture now, you must be wondering. The reason I remember it so well is that it seems to be an image of the way I have…

Diane Setterfield

“Margaret Lea.” “The biographer.”

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“He was the first of my ghosts.”

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“It was like living entirely inside a book.”

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

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What better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books?

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“I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still…

Diane Setterfield

“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 onto this envelope. Who was it who had had his mind’s eye on me while I hadn’t suspected a thing?”

Diane Setterfield

“the Missus stood like a ghost.”

Diane Setterfield

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“But perhaps the answer is to stop writing altogether, for when I do write, even now as I write this very sentence, this very word, I am aware of a ghost reader who leans over my shoulder watching my pen, who twists my words and perverts my meaning, and makes me uncomfortable in the privacy of my own thoughts. It…

Diane Setterfield