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399c5da
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As is well-known, when the moon hours lengthen, human beings come adrift from the regularity of their mechanical clocks. They nod at noon, dream in waking hours, open their eyes wide to the pitch-black night. It is a time of magic. And as the borders between night and day stretch to their thinnest, so too do the borders between worlds. Dreams and stories merge with lived experience, the dead and the living brush against each other in their ..
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Diane Setterfield |
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ff8cefc
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He turned from the daughters of minor aristocrats to those of farriers, farmers and foresters. Personally he couldn't tell the difference, yet the world seemed to mind less.
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Diane Setterfield |
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c55a98d
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For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down.
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Diane Setterfield |
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186684d
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Then he looked beyond the ever-shifting alteration to study the stillness of her expression. He knew his camera could not capture this - that some things were only truly seen by the human eye. This was one of the images of his lifetime. He simply exposed his retina and let love burn her flickering, shimmering, absorbed face onto his soul.
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love
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Diane Setterfield |
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59446e9
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The line between life and death is narrow and dark, and a bereaved twin lives closer to it than most.
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twins
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Diane Setterfield |
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0b9c53d
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It was sublime--and the sublime is not to be trusted.
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Diane Setterfield |
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0536b0c
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People remembered. They wept and they grieved. In the spaces between, they were glad that the leeks were doing well this year, envied the bonnet of the neighbor's cousin, relished the fragrance of pork roasting in the kitchen on Sunday. There were those that registered the beauty of a pale moon suspended behind the branches of the elms on the ridge.
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Diane Setterfield |
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2d21c7b
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I have closed my study door on the world and shut myself away with people of my imagination. For nearly sixty years 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 childern play their make-be..
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fiction
writing
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Diane Setterfield |
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11a6bdf
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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.
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stories
truth
words
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Diane Setterfield |
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05b15d6
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Vida Winter's appearance was not calculated for concealment. She was an ancient queen, sorceress or goddess. Her stiff figure rose regally out of a profusion of fat purple and red cushions. Draped around her shoulders, the folds of the turquoise-and-green cloth that had cloaked her body did not soften the rigidity of her frame. Her bright copper hair had been arranged into an elaborate confection of twists, curls and coils. Her face, as int..
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Diane Setterfield |
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de190b7
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But only when it was too late did they realize the price they must pay for escaping their destiny. Every Happy Ever After was tainted. 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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5b987da
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It gave me a queer feeling. Yesterday or the day before, while I had been going about my business, quietly and in private, some unknown person -- some -- had gone to the trouble of marking my name on this envelope.
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letters
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Diane Setterfield |
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1eb8d62
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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.
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death
reading
writers
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Diane Setterfield |
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daac930
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I reached for the prescription. In a vigorous scrawl, he inked: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. Take ten pages, twice a day, till end of course.
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Diane Setterfield |
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288ffb3
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It was not the sun, but the moonlight that shimmered in the garden, edging the leaves with silver and touching the outlines of the statuary figures.
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Diane Setterfield |
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9f23139
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He felt something move in his chest, as though an organ had been removed and something unfamiliar left in its place. A sentiment he had never suspected the existence of bloomed in him. It traveled from his chest along his veins to every limb. It swelled in his head, muffled his ears, stilled his voice, and collected in his feet and fingers. Having no language for it, he remained silent, but felt it root, become permanent.
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Diane Setterfield |
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32b99c9
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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 came a time when even her heart was abl..
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Diane Setterfield |
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3f263eb
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on those days when he could not spend half an hour in the company of a good book, he felt deprived.
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Diane Setterfield |
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1695db4
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We live like latecomers at the theatre; we must catch up as best we can, dividing the beginning from the shape of later events.
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Diane Setterfield |
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03d8b6a
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My study throngs with characters waiting to be written. Imaginary people, anxious for a life, who tug at my sleeve, crying, 'Me next! Go on! My turn!' I have to select. And once I have chosen, the others lie quiet for ten months or a year, until I come to the end of the story, and the clamor starts up again.
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Diane Setterfield |
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aaf31c1
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They were collectors of words the same way so many of the gravel diggers were collectors of fossils. They kept an ear constantly alert for them, the rare, the unusual, the unique.
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Diane Setterfield |
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12c31cc
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Todos los ninos mitifican su nacimiento. Es un rasgo universal. ?Quieres conocer a alguien? ?Su corazon, su mente, su alma? Pidele que te hable de cuando nacio. Lo que te cuente no sera la verdad: sera una historia. Y nada es tan revelador como una historia. Vida Winter, Cuentos de cambio y desesperacion.
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el-cuento-número-13
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Diane Setterfield |
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d1b9c64
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He has explained why it is that ambiguity touches his heart more nearly than the death and marriage style of finish that i prefer.
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Diane Setterfield |
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be818e4
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After a great many questions I eventually ascertained that he is suffering from some kind of disorder of the mind. Is there anything more sorrowful than a brain whose proper function has been disrupted?
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Diane Setterfield |
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d559a7f
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Her eyes were too full of beauty to leave room for anything so mundane as intelligence.
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Diane Setterfield |
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a40618b
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Las palabras tienen algo especial. En manos expertas, manipuladas con destreza, nos convierten en sus prisioneros. Se enredan en nuestros brazos como tela de arana y en cuanto estamos tan embelesados que no podemos movernos, nos perforan la piel, se infiltran en la sangre, adormecen el pensamiento. Y ya dentro de nosotros ejercen su magia.
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Diane Setterfield |
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dc80302
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A curtain was drawn back in every man's inner theater and their storytelling minds got to work.
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Diane Setterfield |
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0beb634
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How many times have I gone back to the border of memory and peered into the darkness beyond? But it is not only memories that hover on the border. There are all sorts of phantasmagoria that inhabit that realm. The nightmares of a lonely child. Fairy tales appropriated by a mind hungry for a story. The fantasies of an imaginative little girl anxious to explain to herself the inexplicable. Whatever story I may have discovered on the frontier ..
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memories
truth
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Diane Setterfield |
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5e22798
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Time was of the essence. 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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f6b00c5
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His confidences, this mist, had led us unexpectedly onto a peninsula of intimacy, and I found myself on the brink of telling what I had never told anyone before. The words flew ready-formed into my head, organized themselves instantly into sentences, long strings of sentences, bursting with impatience to fly from my tongue. As if they had spent years planning for this moment.
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Diane Setterfield |
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c01de42
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I was in a kind of no-man's-land, a place between places. The mind plays all sorts of tricks, gets up to all kinds of things while we ourselves are slumbering in a white zone that looks for all the world like inattention to the onlooker.
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Diane Setterfield |
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d8c4c8c
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Silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words.
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Diane Setterfield |
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3975b09
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on a summer day winter always seems like something you have dreamt or heard spoken of and not a thing you have lived.
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Diane Setterfield |
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f403a47
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Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words, on the other hand, were a lifeline.
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words
writing
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Diane Setterfield |
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738d16e
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but he is a man, hence cannot see how tiresome it is to have explained at length what one has already fully understood.
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Diane Setterfield |
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8d1af59
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Why do they spend their time with cows when they are surely the more natural companions to unicorns, griffins and dragons? The answer is that the rook lives as he wishes. When he wants the entertainment of human company he is more likely to seek out the drunken poet or the wild-eyed crone than a damsel with a cornet.
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Diane Setterfield |
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6d9985a
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We live like latecomers to the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the begging from the shape of later events.
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Diane Setterfield |
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35fbd33
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Me pase la manana luchando con la sensacion de volutas descarriadas de un mundo intentando filtrarse por las grietas de otro. ?Conoceis la sensacion de empezar un libro nuevo antes de que el recuerdo del ultimo haya tenido tiempo de cerrarse detras de vosotros? Deja uno el libro anterior con ideas y temas --personajes incluso-- atrapados en las fibras de la ropa y cuando abre el libro nuevo siguen ahi.
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Diane Setterfield |
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827f228
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Miracle" was the word Jonathan had pronounced, and they tested it on their own tongues. They were used to it in the Bible, where it meant impossible things that happened an impossibly long time ago in places so far away from here that they might as well not exist. Here in the inn it applied to the laughably improbable chance that the boat mender would ever pay his slate in full: now that would be a miracle all right. But tonight, at winter ..
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Diane Setterfield |
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204118d
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So they became friends, the way old married couples often do, and enjoyed the tender loyalty that awaits the lucky on the other side of passion, without ever living the passion itself.
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Diane Setterfield |
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867f7da
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Le damos tanta importancia a nuestra propia vida que tendemos a creer que su historia comienza con nuestro nacimiento. Primero no habia nada, entonces naci yo... Pero no es asi. Las vidas humanas no son pedazos de cuerda que podemos separar del nudo que forman con otros pedazos de cuerda para enderezarnos. Las familias son tejidos. Resulta imposible tocar una parte sin hacer vibrar el resto. Resulta imposible comprender una parte sin posee..
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Diane Setterfield |
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bf53817
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Un nacimiento no es, en realidad, una introduccion. Nuestra vida, cuando empieza, no es realmente nuestra, sino la continuacion de la historia de otro.
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Diane Setterfield |
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074882f
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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 do hope so. For it must be very lonely being dead.
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Diane Setterfield |
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7b189af
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Readers," continued Miss Winter, "are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay. That's why I couldn't have journalists and biographers rummaging around in my past, retrieving bits and pieces of it, preserving it in their words. To write my books, I needed my past le..
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Diane Setterfield |