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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 2af85f2 | The steps were flanked by a pair of low pedestals, on which were mounted two giant cats carved out of some dark, polished material. The undulations of their anatomy were so persuasively carved that, running my fingers over one, I half expected fur, was startled by the cool hardness of the stone. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 69ca02f | Aurelius Alphonse Love. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 7eceb2c | Margaret Lea." "The biographer." | Diane Setterfield | ||
| c7cc454 | 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. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 4892104 | 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 humour, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They .. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 5ae7c6e | And will you tell me the truth?" "I will tell you the truth." | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 17cc6a1 | I will ask you three things. Things that are a matter of public record. When I leave here, I will be able to check what you tell me. If I find you have told me the truth about them, I will accept the commission." "Ah, the rule of three . . . The magic number." | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 47ee73c | Vida Winter. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 53d628f | There are cultures in which it is believed that a name contains all a person's mystical power. That a name should be known only to God and to the person who holds it and to very few privileged others. To pronounce such a name, either one's own or someone else's, is to invite jeopardy. This, it seemed, was such a name. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 86102c6 | mask of white makeup and the exotic draperies. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| d2a5ac9 | Thinking about it now, I realize that the mark had more or less the form of a Q, but at the time, in the shock of this unexpected and painful act of revealment, it had no such clarity, and it disturbed me the way I would be disturbed by the appearance on a page of English of an unfamiliar symbol from a lost and unreadable language. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 85ab25d | her eyelids were colored purple, lined Cleopatra-style with kohl and fringed with the same heavy black lashes as yesterday. In the clear daylight I saw what I had not seen the night before: along the ruler-straight parting in Miss Winter's copper curls was a narrow margin of pure white. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 7ee5a50 | One should always pay attention to ghosts, shouldn't one, Miss Lea? | Diane Setterfield | ||
| d846929 | Quite by chance, her talk of ghosts comes on the very day the book I am in the middle of reading has completely disappeared, only to be replaced by a novella by Henry James. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 703c2fe | There was no rational explanation for what she had seen. It was unscientific. And Hester knew the world was totally and profoundly scientific. There could be only one explanation. "I must be mad," she whispered. Her pupils dilated and her nostrils quivered. "I have seen a ghost!" | Diane Setterfield | ||
| e77ef4d | To make it true? Was it for me or for her that he made these thankless efforts to connect us? It was an impossible task. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| d5c6e4e | William Henry Cadwalladr | Diane Setterfield | ||
| fdfc05d | the house picked up again its long, slow project of decay. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 8059655 | Even the furniture made the most of the lack of supervision to move about. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 4b17e0b | A few paces behind, I followed him. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 3457822 | Gone were her fiery orange and resplendent purple. She was dressed in a white long-sleeved chemise, and she was weeping. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| fef6d0a | just want to take some photographs. I don't think the weather is on my side, though." "You'll get to see it properly within the hour. This mist won't last long." | Diane Setterfield | ||
| fff7f8c | wall of yew twice | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 0f1cc61 | then into a space where there seemed to be nothing but mist. When we came to a wall of yew twice as high as Aurelius himself, we followed it. I noticed a sparkling in the grass and on the leaves: The sun had come out. The moisture in the air began to evaporate and the circle of visibility grew wider by the minute. Our wall of yew had led us full circle around an empty space; we had arrived back at the same walkway we had entered by. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 51fc8e1 | Why do you come here, Aurelius? | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 9c440b3 | Do you mean to tell me, Aurelius, that you are a foundling?" "Yes. That is the word for what I am. A foundling." | Diane Setterfield | ||
| ad00253 | regretted that he had to comfort me for his own loss. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| f9f1253 | The night I was found there was a big fire here. Mrs. Love told me so, when I was nine. She thought she should, because of the smell of smoke on my clothes when she found me. Later I came over to have a look. And I've been coming ever since. Later I looked it up in the archives of the local paper. Anyway--" His voice had the unmistakable lightness of someone telling something extremely important. A story so cherished it had to be dressed in.. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 849a042 | 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. Well, it was like that. All day I had been .. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 0ab9071 | I believe you," I repeated, my tongue thick with all the waiting words. "I've had that feeling, too. Knowing things you can't know. From before you can remember." And there it was again! A sudden movement in the corner of my eye, there and gone in the same instant." | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 50072e5 | All my unsaid words went back to wherever they had been all these years. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 483f71e | Have you got a birthday?" Aurelius asked. "Yes. I've got a birthday." All my unsaid words went back to wherever they had been all these years. "I'll make a note of it, shall I?" he said brightly. "Then I can send you a card." I feigned a smile. "It's coming up soon, actually. " Aurelius opened a little blue notebook divided into months. "The nineteenth," I told him, and he wrote it down with a pencil so small it looked like a toothpick in h.. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 3b56733 | 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. So," she concluded, "everybody has a story. When are you going to tell me yours?" "I'm not." | Diane Setterfield | ||
| cc88bb7 | The end of my nine o'clocks was another anchor in time gone. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| e82d53d | It was like living entirely inside a book. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 76e84d6 | remember pondering for a long time over a dish of scrambled egg. What did it mean? It could mean anything. I ate a few mouthfuls and pushed the plate away. In this long, undifferentiated lapse of time, there were a few incidents that stood out. I noted them at the time, separately from the story, and they are worth recalling here. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 2fb64cb | rare, and as the household descended from eccentricity into chaos, | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 39aea1f | Shirley goes over the edge." "I don't like games like this." "Now George Sand starts to go up in flames." I sighed and closed my eyes. "Wuthering Heights" | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 5129487 | For me, to see is to read. It has always been that way. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| b5ebdcc | What makes it noteworthy is that a striking coincidence has made it a cleverer trick than they could have known. For the book is a rather silly story about a governess and two haunted children. I am afraid that in it Mr. James exposes the extent of his ignorance. He knows little about children and nothing at all about governesses | Diane Setterfield | ||
| de617bd | What if the child's dependence on her twin is so great that the separation causes a mental trauma such that the damaged mind provides solace by the creation of an imaginary twin, a fantasy companion? We arrived at no satisfactory conclusion but parted with the satisfaction of having located another area of future study: linguistics. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 0d41de2 | but I have come to see that when two people work closely together on a joint project--two intelligent people, I mean to say--a bond of communication develops between them that can enhance their work. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 88621df | the joys of coauthoring a research paper, it is really time to go to bed. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| ba17ab3 | And yet I cannot shake off my misgivings. Even now I can picture her face--so innocent in appearance, so distressed at being accused--and I am forced to wonder, is there some additional factor at play here that I have failed to take into account? When I view the matter in this light it gives rise to an uneasiness in me: I am suddenly overwhelmed by the presentiment that none of my plans is destined to come to fruition. Something has been ag.. | Diane Setterfield |