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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 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 | ||
| 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.. | characters lives people 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. | expression love 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 |