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fa28516
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People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They c..
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Diane Setterfield |
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781e581
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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.
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reading
character
impact
characters
ideas
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Diane Setterfield |
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7683a94
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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. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important th..
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love_of_reading
nostalgia
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Diane Setterfield |
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683ac80
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Of course I loved books more than people.
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Diane Setterfield |
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dfa5dd9
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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.
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reading
re-reading
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Diane Setterfield |
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c0a9cf3
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A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.
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fiction
writing
on-fiction
stories
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Diane Setterfield |
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df0b0f5
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What better place to kill time than a library?
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Diane Setterfield |
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cca0430
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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 when he was born. What you get won't be the truth: it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.
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myth
story
truth
children
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Diane Setterfield |
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fec5ed4
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What better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books?
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Diane Setterfield |
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278b4bf
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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.
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Diane Setterfield |
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c1906ed
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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.
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Diane Setterfield |
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9876c2a
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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 easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else. People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think about them.
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inoffensiveness
politeness
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Diane Setterfield |
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d3c7ba1
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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.
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storytelling
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Diane Setterfield |
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d36ca2e
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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 t..
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storytelling
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Diane Setterfield |
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7fffaa9
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For me to see is to read. It has always been that way.
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Diane Setterfield |
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7a11ded
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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
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Diane Setterfield |
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30a989f
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As for you, you are alive. But it's not the same as living.
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Diane Setterfield |
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68cdd73
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Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother, but the rest of the time there was none. This story is about one of those other times.
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Diane Setterfield |
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95b8284
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I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone.
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reality
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Diane Setterfield |
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4a6b023
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One gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people.
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Diane Setterfield |
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96149cc
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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.
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Diane Setterfield |
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ab9efc7
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Reading can be dangerous.
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the-thirteenth-tale
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Diane Setterfield |
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f4005ca
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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.
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stories
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Diane Setterfield |
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ec97089
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Sometimes when you open the door to the past, what you confront is your destiny.
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Diane Setterfield |
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1ec1036
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I've nothing against people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions.
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Diane Setterfield |
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8fd2052
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One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else.
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Diane Setterfield |
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431cf3b
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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.
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Diane Setterfield |
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b6a381b
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She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.
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Diane Setterfield |
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7526269
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All my life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people I have known, all my memories, dreams, fantasies, everything I have ever read, all of that has been chucked onto the compost heap, where over time it has rotted down to a dark, rich, organic mulch. The process of cellular breakdown makes it unrecognizable. Other people call it the imagination. I think of it as a compost heap. Every so often I take an idea, plant..
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Diane Setterfield |
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c59779e
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Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Familes 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.
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Diane Setterfield |
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0490aae
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To anyone who took the trouble to look, I was plainly visible, but when people are expecting to see nothing, that is usually what they see.
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Diane Setterfield |
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581ae56
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I read novels. The reason is simple: I prefer proper endings. Marriages and deaths, noble sacrifices and miraculous restorations, tragic separations and unhoped-for reunions, great falls and dreams fulfilled; these, in my view, constitute an ending worth the wait. They should come after adventures, perils, dangers and dilemmas, and wind everything up nice and neatly. Endings like this are to be found more commonly in old novels than new o..
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Diane Setterfield |
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65fe099
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Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen 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.
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words
literature
reading
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Diane Setterfield |
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234722a
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opening the book, i inhaled. the smell of old books, so sharp, so dry you can taste it.
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Diane Setterfield |
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436d73d
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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 our advent is something that happened an eternity ago, at the beginning of time. We live like latecomers to the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the begging from the shape of later events. - Vida Winter
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human
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Diane Setterfield |
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faeb1df
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In this cruel world kindness should always be repaid.
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Diane Setterfield |
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58217ed
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He didn't know of course. Not really. And yet that was what he said, and I was soothed to hear it. For I knew what he meant. We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, weight, and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all. "I know," he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did." --
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Diane Setterfield |
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7699b04
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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
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Diane Setterfield |
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247ac16
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I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist. I have peeped shamelessly into hearts and bathroom closets. I have leaned over shoulders to follow the movements of quills as they write love letters, wills and confessions. I have watched as lovers love, murderers murder and children play their make-believe. Prisons and brothels have opened their doors to me; galleons and camel trains have transported me across sea ..
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Diane Setterfield |
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4154763
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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
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words
literature
reading
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Diane Setterfield |
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2595c70
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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 on..
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Diane Setterfield |
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e000f80
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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.
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Diane Setterfield |
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e98df84
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Still in my coat and hat, I sank onto the stair to read the letter. (I never read without making sure I am in a secure position. I have been like this ever since the age of seven when, sitting on a high wall and reading The Water Babies, I was so seduced by the descriptions of underwater life that I unconsciously relaxed my muscles. Instead of being held buoyant by the water that so vividly surrounded me in my mind, I plummeted to the groun..
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Diane Setterfield |
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f24fdeb
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There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner.
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Diane Setterfield |