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ae6cc5e
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What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney?
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Diane Setterfield |
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5360b97
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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.
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profound
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Diane Setterfield |
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cb4276f
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Emmeline didn't call me anything. She didn't need, for I was always there. You only need names for the absent.
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Diane Setterfield |
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50f9bc9
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Life is compost.
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Diane Setterfield |
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c96b11c
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For it must be very lonely being dead.
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Diane Setterfield |
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6b68995
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My job is not to sell the books - my father does that - but to them. 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 improtant enough to be sought after by collectors, my charges are dear to me, even as often as not, they are as dull on the inside as on the outside. No matter how banal the contents,..
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Diane Setterfield |
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8c34ca1
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There are times when the human face and body can express the yearning of the heart so accurately that you can, as they say, read them like a book. Do not abandon me.
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Diane Setterfield |
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27c29b7
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You are suffering from an ailment that affects ladies of romantic imaginations. Symptoms include fainting, weariness, loss of appetite, low spirits. While on one level the crisis can be ascribed to wandering about in freezing rain without the benefit of adequate waterproofing, the deeper cause is more likely to be found in some emotional trauma. However, unlike the heroines of your favorite novels, your constitution has not been weakened by..
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Diane Setterfield |
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0c2c8ed
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Sometimes you can know things. Things about yourself. Things from before you can remember.
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Diane Setterfield |
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5ed3eb0
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Tragedy alters everything.
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Diane Setterfield |
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f79e42c
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We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delinaments, 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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3cdde99
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Fate, at first so amenable, so reasonable, so open to negotiation, ends up by exacting a cruel revenge for happiness.
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Diane Setterfield |
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9e83fe2
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But there can be no secrets in a house where there are children.
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Diane Setterfield |
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c2eec6a
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It was better to tell such stories close to the river than in a drawing room. Words accumulate indoors, trapped by walls and ceilings. The weight of what has been said can lie heavily on what might yet be said and suffocate it. By the river the air carries the story on a journey: one sentence drifts away and makes way for the next.
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secrets
storytelling
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Diane Setterfield |
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cf8269f
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Without the past to cast its long shadow, might you see the future more clearly?
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shadows
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Diane Setterfield |
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7794921
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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.
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Diane Setterfield |
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09bdd49
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And now, dear reader, the story is over. It is time for you to cross the bridge once more and return to the world you came from. This river, which is and is not the Thames, must continue flowing without you. You have haunted here long enough, and besides, you surely have rivers of your own to attend to?
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Diane Setterfield |
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065fad8
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What better place to kill time than a library? And for me, 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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0e15530
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Of course I loved books more than people. Of course I valued "Jane Eyre" over the anonymous stranger...Of course all of Shakespeare was worth more than a human life."
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Diane Setterfield |
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d045aa7
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The funeral was over, at last I could cry. Except that I couldn't. My tears, kept in too long, had fossilized. They would have to stay in forever now.
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Diane Setterfield |
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c2e6809
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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..
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Diane Setterfield |
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5dd3754
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When you read a manuscript that has been damaged by water, fire, light or just the passing of the years, your eye needs to study not just the shape of the letters but other marks of production. The speed of the pen. The pressure of the hand on the page. Breaks and releases in the flow. You must relax. Think of nothing. Until you wake into a dream where you are at once a pen flying of vellum and the vellum itself with the touch of ink tickli..
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reading
writing
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Diane Setterfield |
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a95e796
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No one can hold you to a decision made in the middle of the night.
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Diane Setterfield |
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9f54eb7
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She could not read a book for fear of the feelings she might find in it.
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Diane Setterfield |
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01939a7
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The tears I gratified him with were fake ones. Ones that set off my green eyes the way diamonds set off emeralds. And it worked. If you dazzled a man with green eyes, he will be so hypnotized that he won't notice there is someone inside the eyes spying on him. - Vida Winters Page 268
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Diane Setterfield |
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b9cc07e
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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.
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Diane Setterfield |
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e7df765
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My genius is not so frail a thing that it cowers from the dirty fingers of newspapernen.
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intelligence
media
press
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Diane Setterfield |
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31afcd3
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when people are expecting to see nothing that is usually what they see.
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Diane Setterfield |
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68706a3
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I shall start at the beginning. Though of course, the beginning is never where you think it is.
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Diane Setterfield |
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c7e43bf
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There are stories that may be told aloud, and stories that must be told in whispers, and there are stories that are never told at all.
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Diane Setterfield |
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7790212
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I read *old* novels. The reason is simple. I prefer proper endings.
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Diane Setterfield |
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a52012a
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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.
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Diane Setterfield |
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1d895b7
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Boys do not leave their boyhood behind when they leave off their school uniform.
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Diane Setterfield |
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b90f8f3
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As one tends to the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. I clean them, do minor repairs, keep them in good order. 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. 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 d..
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reading
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Diane Setterfield |
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ce7613a
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Peasants and princes, bailiffs and bakers' boys, merchants and mermaids, the figures were all immediately familiar. I had read these stories a hundred, a thousand, times before. They were stories everyone knew. But gradually, as I read, their familiarity fell away from them. They became strange. They became new. These characters were not the colored manikins I remembered from my childhood picture books, mechanically acting out the story one..
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Diane Setterfield |
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1049e72
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There must be more to stories than you think.
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Diane Setterfield |
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6a3ff49
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She had not had the relief of amnesia. She had suffered longer, and she had suffered more. Each second was agony in the first weeks. She was like an amputee in the days before anesthesia, half crazed with pain, astounded that the human body could feel so much and not die of it. But slowly, cell by painful cell, she began to mend. There came a time when it was no longer her whole body that burned with pain but only her heart. And then there ..
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grief
healing
pain
physical-pain
suffering
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Diane Setterfield |
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88be701
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Ordinary people, untwins, seek their soulmate, take lovers, marry. Tormented by their incompleteness they strive to be part of a pair.
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Diane Setterfield |
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9105ef7
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Reading had never let me down before. It had always been the one sure thing.
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reader
reading
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Diane Setterfield |
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494d1f9
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Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating.
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Diane Setterfield |
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a182e11
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In the background is the hiss of the gas heater; we hear the sound without hearing it for, side by side, together and miles apart, we are deep in our books.
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Diane Setterfield |
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eca2f98
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For at eight o'clock the world came to an end. It was reading time. 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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ba023a9
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Our clients' faces, with the customary outward paleness and inner glow of the book lover.
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Diane Setterfield |
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209baa5
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I looked out into the dead garden. Against the fading light, my shadow hovered in the glass, looking into the dead room. What did she make of us? I wondered. What did she think of our attempts to persuade ourselves that this was life and that we were really living it?
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Diane Setterfield |