Diane Setterfield Quotes

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• 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 are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.

  Diane Setterfield

  Moving, Writing, Blood

  Diane Setterfield (2006). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.8, Simon and Schuster

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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

  Diane Setterfield

  Reading, Joy, Stage

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale”, p.39, Simon and Schuster

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• 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 lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. 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

  Running, Wall, Lying

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.5, Simon and Schuster

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

  Diane Setterfield

  Way

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.20, Simon and Schuster

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• 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

  Silence, Needs, Stories

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.300, Simon and Schuster

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• A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

  Diane Setterfield

  Broken, Stories, Pieces

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.6, Simon and Schuster

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

  Diane Setterfield

  Reality

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.14, Simon and Schuster

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• 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 is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.

  Diane Setterfield

  Children, Book, Nostalgic

  Diane Setterfield (2006). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.32, Simon and Schuster

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• There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.

  Diane Setterfield

  Book, World, Lines

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.29, Simon and Schuster

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• Of course I loved books more than people.

  Diane Setterfield

  Book, People, Courses

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale”, p.295, Simon and Schuster

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• Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head.

  Diane Setterfield

  Book, Ice, Law

  Diane Setterfield (2011). “The Thirteenth Tale”, p.24, Hachette UK

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

  Diane Setterfield

  Void

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.115, Simon and Schuster

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• What better place to kill time than a library?

  Diane Setterfield

  Library, Better Place

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.41, Simon and Schuster

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• A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.

  Diane Setterfield

  Stories, Cases, Significance

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale”, p.269, Simon and Schuster

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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 believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same.

  Diane Setterfield

  Children, Believe, Book

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• As for you, you are alive. But it's not the same as living.

  Diane Setterfield

  Alive

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.183, Simon and Schuster

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• Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so.

  Diane Setterfield

  Book, Reading, Light

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.17, Simon and Schuster

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• My mother and I were like two continents moving slowly but inexorably apart; my father, the bridge builder, constantly extending the fragile edifice he had constructed to connect us.

  Diane Setterfield

  Mother, Father, Moving

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale”, p.236, Simon and Schuster

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• But she had that laugh, and the sound of it was so beautiful that when you heard it, it was as if your eyes saw her through your ears and she was transformed.

  Diane Setterfield

  Beautiful, Eye, Laughing

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale”, p.113, Simon and Schuster

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• The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours. Against the blue candlewick bedspread the white pages of my open book, illuminated by a circle of lamplight, were the gateway to another world.

  Diane Setterfield

  Morning, Book, Eight

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale”, p.29, Simon and Schuster

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• For it must be very lonely being dead.

  Diane Setterfield

  Lonely

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.17, Simon and Schuster

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

  Diane Setterfield

  Children, House, Secret

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale”, p.72, Simon and Schuster

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• Prescription: 'Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. Take ten pages, twice a day, til end of course.

  Diane Setterfield

  Book, Pages, Conan

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• There are cultures in which it is believed that a name contains all a persons mystical power. That a name should be known only to God and to the person who holds it and to very few privileged others. To pronounce such a name either ones own or someone else's is to invite jeopardy. This it seemed was such a name.

  Diane Setterfield

  Names, Culture, Should

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.52, Simon and Schuster

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

  Diane Setterfield

  Ambition, Thinking, People

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.45, Simon and Schuster

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