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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 3254664 | We turned into the rose garden where the pruned bushes appeared as piles of dead twigs, but the elaborate borders of box that surrounded them in sinuous Elizabethan patterns twisted in and out of the moonlight, showing here silver, there black. A dozen times I would have lingered--a single ivy leaf turned at an angle to catch the moonlight perfectly; a sudden view of the great oak tree, etched with inhuman clarity against the pale sky--but .. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| aa560b1 | could just see the movements of Miss Winter's lashes. They crouched and quivered around the eye, like the long legs of a spider around its body. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 0f8f5c8 | I'm a storyteller." "I am a biographer." | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 58f4e0e | Don't you think one can tell the truth much better with a story? | Diane Setterfield | ||
| dddcdf7 | do you believe in ghosts? | Diane Setterfield | ||
| ae4b004 | I have written a number of short biographical studies of insignificant personages from literary history. My interest has always been in writing biographies of the also-rans: people who lived in the shadow of fame in their own lifetime and who, since their death, have sunk into profound obscurity. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| e0d4ee1 | copper curls turned. I was stunned. The glasses were gone. Green eyes, bright as glass and as real, | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 8908124 | she could not be less than seventy-three or -four, and to judge by her appearance, altered though it was by illness and makeup, she could be no more than eighty. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 8d615a0 | 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. And during this time, these days when I read all day and half the night, when I slept under a counterpane strewn with books, when my sleep was black and dreamless and passed in a flash and I woke to read again--the lost joys of reading returned to me. Miss .. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 8d283b0 | I felt a strange sensation inside. Like the past coming to life. The watery stirring of a previous life turning in my belly, creating a tide that rose in my veins and sent cool wavelets to lap at my temples. The ghastly excitement of it. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 42bc2b7 | The almanac cut her and her babies adrift; she and they fell into the vast ocean of ordinary people, whose births and deaths and marriages are, like their loves and fears and breakfast preferences, too insignificant to be worth recording for posterity. Charlie, though, was a male. The almanac could stretch itself--just--to include him, though the dimness of insignificance was already casting its shadow. Information was scant. His name was C.. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| beb0259 | as though if I looked hard enough, there would be revealed in the grain or the watermark of the paper itself the elucidation of the mystery. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 7360cd1 | stood with my hand on the handle of the third door. The rule of three, Miss Winter had said. But I wasn't in the mood for her story anymore. Her dangerous house with its indoor rain and trick mirror had lost its interest for me. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| ad2b22a | Just what kind of a person are you, Miss Lea?" I fixed my mask in place before replying" | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 1be9143 | What are your favorite books? What do you dream about? Whom do you love? | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 6812b6f | That name was Adeline March. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| fae44d6 | We were both lone twins. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| b0b993b | held out to me a closed fist that seemed three-quarters precious stones in their clawlike settings. In a movement that spoke of great effort, she turned her hand and opened it, as though she had some surprise gift concealed and was about to offer it to me. But there was no gift. The surprise was the hand itself. The flesh of her palm was like no flesh I had seen before. Its whitened ridges and purple furrows bore no relation to the pink mou.. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 19f5cc7 | I'm sorry," I heard her say. "One gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people." | Diane Setterfield | ||
| b71c757 | I left wide margins. In the left-hand one I noted any mannerisms, expressions and gestures that seemed to add something to her meaning. The right-hand margin I left blank. Later, rereading, it was here that I would enter my own thoughts, comments, questions. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| c56ca73 | Never let time be your master,' Bellman told Verney when he asked about it. 'If you want to do something, take it on. Time will always make itself. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 070efec | For all my biographical projects I have kept a box of lives. A box of index cards containing the details--name, occupation, dates, place of residence and any other piece of information that seems relevant--of all the significant people in the life of my subject. I never quite know what to make of my boxes of lives. Depending on my mood they either strike me as a memorial to gladden the dead ("Look!" I imagine them saying as they peer throug.. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| e8e68d5 | Cuando el miedo y el frio hacen de ti una estatua en tu propia cama, no ansies que la Verdad pura y dura acuda en tu auxilio. Lo que necesitas es el mullido consuelo de un relato. La proteccion balsamica, adormecedora, de una mentira. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| f12a48d | remembered the gray cat that had appeared, as if by magic, on her lap. Silently he had sat under her stroking hand, regarding me fixedly with his round yellow eyes. If he saw my ghosts, if he saw my secrets, he did not seem the least perturbed, but only blinked and continued to stare indifferently. "What's his name?" I had asked. "Shadow," she absently replied." | Diane Setterfield | ||
| bd41aae | Sin duda, una buena historia deslumbra mucho mas que un pedazo de verdad. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 83bff71 | 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, the weight and the dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the colour of grief is common to us all. 'I know,' he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| fc773a9 | Since we are on the topic of ravens, a collective noun for ravens is an unkindness. This is somewhat puzzling to Thought and Memory. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 703c853 | any number of peas under the mattress and I would not know it-- | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 2b2b167 | Nikad nemoj dozvoliti da ti vrijeme bude gospodar', rekao je Bellman. 'Ako nesto zelis uciniti, ucini to. Vrijeme ce se stvoriti samo od sebe.' No zapravo, smatrao je da je otkrio - ili mu je darovan - kljuc znanosti o upravljanju vremenom. Mogao je otkljucati vrijeme poput kovcega kad god mu se prohtjelo, staviti uteg na klatno i usporiti njegovo kretanje. Mogao je rastaviti sate na dijelove, pronaci u njima dodatne minute koje su odlazile.. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 5277a93 | At last, after all the tale telling and all the yarn spinning, after the smoke screens and the trick mirrors and the double bluffs, I knew. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| bef3a96 | tightly drawn into a mask of endurance. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 8a2a96e | remembered the words of the man in the brown suit, and how they had echoed around the rafters of my rooms under the eaves. Yet the man in the brown suit was a figment of her imagination. I should have expected it. She was a spinner of yarns, wasn't she? A storyteller. A fabulist. A liar. And the plea that had so moved me--Tell me the truth--had been uttered by a man who was not even real. I was at a loss to explain to myself the bitterness .. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 98204e3 | Emmeline and Adeline. Unmistakable. Two manes of red hair, two pairs of black shoes; one child in the navy poplin that the Missus had put Emmeline in that morning, the other in green. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| e4bdfcd | All the grief I had kept at bay for years by means of books and bookcases approached me now. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 9cc036a | 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 | ||
| dbaaf4c | We've been expecting you. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 8b6c9ae | Ivan Lea | Diane Setterfield | ||
| abcd6d5 | I thought you said something about a wolf' I began. 'Yes. That black beast that gnaws at my bones whenever he gets a chance. He loiters in corners and behind doors most of the time, because he's afraid of these.' She indicated the white pills on the table beside her. 'But they don't last forever. It's nearly twelve and they are wearing off. He is sniffing at my neck. By half past he will be digging his teeth and claws in. Until one, when I .. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 8086515 | Mr. Lomax had signed for Emmeline. That told me that she had survived the fire, at least. And on the second line, the name I had been hoping for. Vida Winter. And after it, in brackets, the words, formerly known as Adeline March. Proof. Vida Winter was Adeline March. She was telling the truth. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 1e8feb6 | But there was more. Did she know I had noticed? I had made no outward sign. But I had noticed. Today Miss Winter had said I. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| eebc263 | It was Hester herself, made word. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 27da589 | This might seem excessive; ten years of marriage is usually enough to cure marital affection, | Diane Setterfield | ||
| f2bb21a | And is it better to know?" he asked me. "I can't tell you. But once you know, it's impossible to go back." | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 730a398 | The letter Q for question, seared into human flesh. As I started to sleepwrite my questions, the margin seemed to expand. The paper throbbed with light. Swelling, it engulfed me, until I realized with a mixture of trepidation and wonderment that I was enclosed in the grain of the paper, embedded in the white interior of the story itself. Weightless, I wandered all night long in Miss Winter's story, plotting its landscape, measuring its cont.. | Diane Setterfield |