Diane Setterfield Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

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

  Diane Setterfield

  Integrity, People, Healthy

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.44, Simon and Schuster

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• And sometimes then he sat with us for an hour or so, sharing our limbo, listening while I read. Books from any shelf, opened at any page, in which I would start and finish anywhere, mid-sentence sometimes. Wuthering Heights ran into Emma, which gave way to The Eustace Diamonds, which faded into Hard Times, which ceded to The Woman in White. Fragments. It didn't matter. Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words, on the other hand, were a lifeline.

  Diane Setterfield

  Art, Book, Hard Times

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.312, Simon and Schuster

  5 Copy quote

• Reading can be dangerous.

  Diane Setterfield

  Reading, Dangerous

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale”, p.4, Simon and Schuster

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

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

  Diane Setterfield

  Simple, Reason, Novel

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

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• I shall start at the beginning. Though of coarse, the beginning is never where you think it is.

  Diane Setterfield

  Thinking, Coarse

  5 Copy quote

• 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 laid out straight. Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole. - Vida Winter

  Diane Setterfield

  Winter, Thinking, Important

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.58, Simon and Schuster

  11 Copy quote

• Without the past to cast its long shadow, might you see the future more clearly?

  Diane Setterfield

  Past, Long, Shadow

  Diane Setterfield (2014). “Bellman & Black: A Novel”, p.47, Simon and Schuster

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  Diane Setterfield

  Single Mom, Writing, Ideas

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.416, Simon and Schuster

  5 Copy quote

• Every so often I take out a volume and read a page or two. After all, reading is looking after in a manner of speaking. Though they're not old enough to be valuable for their age alone, nor important enough to be sought after by collectors, my charges are dear to me, even if, as often as not, they are as dull on the inside as on the outside. No matter how banal the contents, there is always something that touches me. For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down.

  Diane Setterfield

  Reading, Writing, Two

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

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• For it must be very lonely being dead.

  Diane Setterfield

  Lonely

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

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

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

  Diane Setterfield

  Book, Choices, Way

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

  5 Copy quote

• Tragedy alters everything.

  Diane Setterfield

  Tragedy

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.35, Simon and Schuster

  5 Copy quote

• 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 you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes -- characters even -- caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.

  Diane Setterfield

  Morning, Book, Reading

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.289, Simon and Schuster

  5 Copy quote

• Everybody has a story. It's like families. You might not know who they are, might have lost them, but they exist all the same. You might drift apart or you might turn your back on them, but you can't say you haven't got them. Same goes for stories.

  Diane Setterfield

  Stories, Might, Like Family

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

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

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

  Diane Setterfield

  People, Dull, Facts

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

  5 Copy quote

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

  Diane Setterfield

  Mean, Realizing, Ill

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.104, Simon and Schuster

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

• Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words on the other hand, were a lifeline. They left their hushed rhythm behind, a counter to the slow in and out of Emmeline's breathing.

  Diane Setterfield

  Art, Hands, Breathing

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.312, Simon and Schuster

  5 Copy quote

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

  Diane Setterfield

  Remember, Sometimes, About Yourself

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.220, Simon and Schuster

  5 Copy quote

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

  Diane Setterfield

  Dirty, Genius, Frail

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

  5 Copy quote

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