|
7b92239
|
At first the boys were puzzled by illness. They looked at their father from the other side of a wall of pain, bewildered that their father stood writing in his book, when he had only to reach over the division and lift them clear of it.
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
72c030c
|
Seventeen years being neither a very short nor a very long time, Phillip was remembered and misremembered in equal measure.
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
1b37f6a
|
I'd expected that I would expand to fit the experience automatically, that I would get my first glimpse of the person I was destined to be.
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
bc90403
|
Again she missed God. She had shared everything with him. From childhood she had gone to him with every question, doubt, delight, and triumph. He had accompanied every advance in her thinking; in action he had been her daily collaborator. But God was gone. This was something she was going to have to work out by herself.
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
6ba8f70
|
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.
|
|
time
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
c583bcc
|
One of the best ways of avoiding his torments was to be ignorant about something and let him put you straight.
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
e658df0
|
It was solstice night, the longest night of the year. For weeks the days had been shrinking, first gradually, then precipitously, so that it was now dark by mid-afternoon. 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..
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
ef9eda8
|
All evidence of the house ghost reasserting herself.
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
3ea84d1
|
She was too old to be young and other women her age had been crossed off the list of women suitable for appraisal,
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
18ea3da
|
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.
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
12e2ef7
|
Tributaries A river on a map is a simple thing. Our river starts at Trewsbury Mead, and follows a course of some two hundred and thirty-six miles to reach the sea at Shoeburyness. But anyone who takes the trouble to follow its route, whether by boat or on foot, cannot help being aware that, furlong by furlong, singleness of direction is not its most obvious feature. En route the river does not seem particularly intent on reaching its destin..
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
f79db71
|
Along the borders of this world lie others. There are places you can cross. This is one such place.
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
e401b4b
|
fields and land to one side and the other. It finds its way into wells and is drawn up to launder petticoats and be boiled for tea. It is sucked into root membranes, travels up cell by cell to the surface, is held in the leaves of watercress that find themselves in the soup bowls and on the cheeseboards of the county's diners. From teapot or soup dish, it passes into mouths, irrigates complex internal biological networks that are worlds in ..
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
3796296
|
Joe the storyteller was remembered at the Swan for a long, long time. And though eventually there came a day when the man himself was forgotten, his stories lived on.
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
622e955
|
spaces beneath our feet, in the fractures and voids in the rock, in caverns and fissures and channels, there are waterways as numerous, as meandering, as circuitous, as anything aboveground. The beginning of the Thames is not the beginning--or, rather, it is only to us that it seems like a beginning. In fact Trewsbury Mead might not be the beginning in any case. There are those who say it's the wrong place. The not-even-the-beginning is not..
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
0a22edc
|
Ah, tributaries! That's what I was meaning to come to. The Churn, the Key, the Ray, the Coln, the Leach, and the Cole: in these upper reaches of the Thames, these are the streams and rivulets that come from elsewhere to add their own volume and momentum to that of the Thames. And tributaries are about to join this story. We might, in the quiet hour before dawn, leave this river and this long night and trace the tributaries back, to see not ..
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
e2ae14c
|
I see," she said softly, nodding her head as though she really did. "Well, it's your business, of course." She turned her hand in her lap and stared into her damaged palm. "You are at liberty to say nothing, if that is what you want. But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grow pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you." Her eyes swiveled back to me. "Believe me, Margaret. I know."
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
5efc504
|
Avete presente quando cominciate a leggere un nuovo libro prima che la membrana di quello precedente abbia avuto il tempo di richiudersi dietro di voi? Quando lasciate il vecchio libro avete idee, argomenti - perfino personaggi - impigliati nelle fibre dei vestiti e, aprendo quello nuovo, scoprite che sono ancora con voi.
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
3d2c851
|
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 ..
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
9dfb078
|
Any governess, after the few hours I have had in this house, would have a full and clear picture of the task awaiting her, but he is a man, hence cannot see how tiresome it is to have explained at length what one has already fully understood.
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
fc36a3b
|
He put an arm around me, "I know," he said. "I know." 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."
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
996b7db
|
Something happens and then something else happens and then all sorts of other things happen, expected and unexpected, unusual and ordinary.
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
2659fe7
|
A letter. For me. That was something of an event. The crisp-cornered envelope, puffed up with its thickly folded contents, was addressed in a hand that must have given the postman a certain amount of trouble.
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
2f9f79b
|
A child is not an empty vessel.... to be formed in whatever way the parent thinks fit. They are born with their own hearts and they cannot be made otherwise, no matter what love a man lavishes on them.
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
55ff01d
|
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..
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
c9b6708
|
And there is more: what we see on a map is only the half of it. A river no more begins at its source than a story begins with the first page. Take Trewsbury Mead, for instance. That photograph, do you remember? The one they were so quick to dismiss, because it wasn't picturesque? An ordinary ash in an ordinary field, they said, and so it appears, but look more closely. See this indentation in the ground, at the foot of the tree? See how it ..
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
385e8bf
|
They sat on the bank. 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 room for the next.
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
8f3f810
|
One of the first keys to success, he considered, was to recognize the difference between problems you could do something about and problems you could do nothing about.
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
9f54c65
|
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..
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
f5ad1d1
|
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.
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
d5798b3
|
What is it that allows human beings to see through each other's pretendings? For I understood quite clearly in that moment that she was anxious. Perhaps emotions have a smell or taste; perhaps we transmit them unknowingly by vibrations in the air. Whatever the means, I knew just as surely that it was nothing about me in particular that alarmed her, but only the fact that I had come and was a stranger.
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
1dca083
|
There was no magic behind the silence - it was the soft-furnishings that did it. Overstuffed sofas were piled with velvet cushions; there were upholstered footstools, chaise longues, and armchairs; tapestries hung on the walls and were used as throws over upholstered furniture. Every floor was carpeted, every carpet overlaid with rugs. The damask that draped the windows also baffled the walls. Just as blotting paper absorbs ink, so all this..
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
ad0a426
|
Don't be so polite. If there's one thing I can't abide, it's politeness.
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
300bc17
|
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 children play their make-believe. Prisons and brothels have opened their doors to me; galleons and camel trains have tra..
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
d92559a
|
When one is nothing, one invents. It fills a void.
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
f974a17
|
The storyteller gave me a sideways look. "Miss Lea, it doesn't do to get attached to these secondary characters. It's not their story. They come and go, and when they're gone, they're gone for good. That is all there is to it."
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
6ba8713
|
Perhaps it didn't matter, I told myself. Who was there to miss me? No one would suffer from my going. That was a blessing.
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
4874acd
|
Adeline was made like a piece of wire with knots for knees and elbows.
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
207e481
|
I did not see the wolf when he came. I did not hear him. There was only this: A little before dawn I became aware of a hush, and I realized that the only breathing to be heard in the room was my own.
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
e572f95
|
made
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
26f3844
|
Then something rang a bell in his mind. What
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
9af23d2
|
Not even a ghost could survive here.
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
e38a0ce
|
turquoise-and-green cloth that 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 intricately lined as a map, was powdered white and finished with bold scarlet lipstick. In her lap, her hands were a cluster of rubies, emeralds and white, bony knuckles; only her nails, unvarnished, cut short and square like my own, struck an..
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |
|
7420a6e
|
What unnerved me more than all the rest were her sunglasses. I could not see her eyes but, as I remembered the inhuman green irises from the poster, her dark lenses seemed to develop the force of a searchlight; I had the impression that from behind them she was looking through my skin and into my very soul. I drew a veil over myself, masked myself in neutrality, hid behind my appearance.
|
|
|
Diane Setterfield |