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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| e0a3dbb | The cat, I remember. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 360bd5a | the Missus stood like a ghost. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| ca50369 | The key that sits in the lock, unused since the days of Hester, is hot. It burns my palm as I turn it. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 528b819 | 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 leant 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 transported me across sea a.. | people characters lives writers | Diane Setterfield | |
| e009c4a | She's not coming back." "No." He knew it was true. He had the feeling that the world might easily stop turning without the girl in it. Every hour was arduous, and when it was over, you had to start again with a new one, no better. He wondered how long he would be able to keep it going." | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 1fc43ed | Wait!" he said. "Hold your scolding till you know what I have come to tell you!" | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 6be1f38 | My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 0d71c10 | earl, his mother a black servant girl--had brought | Diane Setterfield | ||
| d7fd882 | Moments came back to him when he had behaved less honorably than he wished. He remembered instances of neglect and ingratitude. He felt the pang of remorse and resolved not to do the same again. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| cc1f90a | A child is not an empty vessel, Fleet, 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 | ||
| 2211214 | 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 | ||
| 383d4b6 | The world of the almanac was a queer one. In the real world, families branched like trees, blood mixed by marriage passed from one generation to the next, making an ever-wider net of connections. Titles, on the other hand, passed from one man to one man, and it was this narrow, linear progression that the almanac liked to highlight. On each side of the title line were a few younger brothers, nephews, cousins, who came close enough to fall w.. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 4fb0496 | Alongside my mispronunciation of , and in seventeen languages, and my ability to recite the Greek alphabet forward and backward (I who have never learned a word of Greek in my life), the phonetic alphabet was one of those secret, random wells of useless knowledge left over from my bookish childhood. I learned it only to amuse myself; its purpose in those days was merely private, so as the years passed I made no particular effort to pra.. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 9d96a07 | side by side, together and miles apart, we are deep in our books. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 6f8eb03 | He had given up trying to make her believe only what was true, she had been raised to the kind of religion that could admit no difference between what was true and what was good. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 57d86e0 | Pigs were funny creatures. You could almost think they were human the way they looked at you sometimes. Or was the pig remembering something? Yes, she realized, that was it. The pig looked exactly as if she were recollecting some happiness now lost, so that joy remembered was overlaid with present sorrow. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| e9afa6b | Lily was no great reader. She could not tell b from d and all the letters quivered on the page as soon as they felt the brush of her gaze; but when her mother read aloud in her gentle voice, the lines settled and she found she could follow the thread after all, mouthing the words silently in time. Sometimes | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 0387e4f | a single lupine exhalation could reduce it to rubble. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 041fa96 | He knows what reading is. How it takes you. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| b8addd8 | that. I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, | Diane Setterfield | ||
| d45750d | I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 17d6f96 | I must photograph you again," he said as he rinsed the plate. "What's wrong with this one?" Nothing. He wanted her at every angle, in every possible lighting, in all moods and all positions. He wanted her with her hair loose around her face and pulled right back, concealed under a hat; he wanted her in a white chemise open at the neck and draped in folds of dark cloth; he wanted her in water and against tree trunks and on grass . . . There .. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 1054be0 | my hunger for books was constant. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 8aa955f | Does the occurrence of one impossible thing increase the likelihood of a second. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 7d69c3e | and goings, and the past and the present touch and overlap. Unexpected things can happen. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| c006110 | In summer he was a different person, sprightly and alert, and people took him for a man a decade younger than his years; but in winter he sank as the skies darkened, and by December he was always tired. When he went to bed, he drowned in sleep; when he was wakened from it, dragged from the depths , he was somehow always unrefreshed. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 6bc5d59 | 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. | love expression yearning-of-the-heart | Diane Setterfield | |
| 060abeb | You may not want to be my son, but I cannot help but be your father. | parents | Diane Setterfield | |
| 039bbc0 | There is something about words. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| e212add | myself, I found that my thoughts had been rearranged in my absence. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 577de6c | 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 | ||
| b59caf0 | Half a year--maybe." "Something like that." Rita did not look away. Part of her job was to help people look at what was coming. Dying could be lonely. A nurse was often an easier person to talk to than family. She held his gaze with hers." | Diane Setterfield | ||
| dc87617 | The laws of life and death, as she had learned them, were incomplete. There was more to life, more to death, than medical science had known. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 2e39774 | I hardly suppose Wagner lost sleep worrying whether he'd hurt someone's feelings. But then he was a genius. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| cc793a3 | All children mythologize their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won't be the truth; it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 715c8ea | 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. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| ab9bb16 | 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 a 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 | ||
| f235fb7 | She made her resolution. In for a penny, in for a pound. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 403afdf | Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won't be the truth; it will be a story. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 716f858 | I know,' he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 28d2694 | The incendiary magic she possessed was so strong she could set fire to water if she wanted to badly enough. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 8d16d50 | He explained to me at great length the difficulties I am likely to face here, and I listened with as much politeness as I could muster. 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. My fidgeting and the slight sharpness of one or two of my answers.. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 2418b99 | Politeness. Now, there's a poor man's virtue if ever there was one. What's so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After all, it's easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else. People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think about them. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 786d550 | Death might be a necessity in farming, but suffering? Never. | Diane Setterfield |