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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f8f2ef2 | Anyone would think you'd seen a ghost! | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 88e37ed | undid my knitting. All those little knots that you make one after another, row by row, to knit a sock, I undid them. It's easy. Take the needles out, a little tug and they just fall apart. One after another, row by row. I undid the extra heel and then I just kept going. The foot, the first heel, the ribbing of the leg. All those loops unraveling themselves as you pull the wool. Then there was nothing left to unravel, only a pile of crinkled.. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| d8497b7 | The mist was almost gone. The magical shapes of the topiary had lost their charm and looked like the unkempt bushes and hedges they were. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 785857d | But you know it was here? In this house?" Aurelius shoved his hands into the depths of his pockets. His shoulders tightened. "I wouldn't expect other people to understand. I haven't got any proof. But I do know." He sent me a quick glance, and I encouraged him, with my eyes, to continue. "Sometimes you can know things. Things about yourself. Things from before you can remember. I can't explain it." | Diane Setterfield | ||
| ead5a3d | Thomas Ambrose Proctor! | Diane Setterfield | ||
| abc460c | And my own feelings? Shame. For I had lied. Of course I loved books more than people. Of course I valued Jane Eyre over the anonymous stranger with his hand on the lever. Of course all of Shakespeare was worth more than a human life. Of course. Unlike Miss Winter, I had been ashamed to say so. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 5ec0d96 | 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 | ||
| 4c63661 | holding up a single picture and studying it with a frown. She's seen a ghost, | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 8a58f15 | but no matter how far I forgot myself, I never quite lost my sense of being watched over, and when I got particularly lost, it was the gaze of the cat that seemed to reach into my muddle and light my way back to my room, my notes, my pencils and my pencil sharpener. He even slept with me on my bed some nights, and I took to leaving my curtains open so that if he woke he could sit on my windowsill seeing things move in the dark that were inv.. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 0579ff3 | We had reached tipping point. It was no longer possible to call it a demolition site. Tomorrow, today perhaps, the workers would return and it would become a construction site. The past demolished, it was time for them to start building the future. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 637d0e7 | Miss Lea, it does not do to get attached to these secondary characters It's not their story. They come, they go, and when they go they're gone for good. That's all there is to it. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 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 |