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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f828453 | The beginning, perhaps. The girl without the mother. But after that . . . I wish someone could tell me what it means. I wish there was someone who could just tell me the truth. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| c69141a | For it looked as if the walls were simply dissolving in the rain; those stones still standing, pale and insubstantial as rice paper, seemed ready to melt away under my very eyes if I just stood there long enough. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 542c583 | Quale sostegno, quale consolazione nella Verita, a paragone di una storia? A che giova la Verita a mezzanotte, al buio, quando il vento ruggisce nel comignolo come un orso? Quando il lampo sprigiona ombre sulla parete della stanza e la pioggia bussa alla finestra con le sue lunghe unghie? No: quando paura e freddo ti immobilizzano a letto come una statua, non aspettarti che la scarna e ossuta Verita accorra in tuo aiuto. Quello che ci vuole.. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| f4b9863 | Someone had told him once that the desire to do something well is a good indicator of talent. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 3cc608d | So much science has at its root the ability to see afresh what has been seen and thought to be understood for centuries. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| c8b76b2 | 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 Iwas 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 | ||
| 0975ca8 | However, in ordinary life, one cannot live by such principles. Imagine the time it would take if every aspect of experience had to be scrutinized afresh every minute of every day. No; in order to free ourselves from the mundane it is essential that we delegate much of our interpretation of the world to that lower area of the mind that deals with the presumed, the assumed, the probable. Even though it sometimes leads us astray and causes us .. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 2e6a289 | Remember, this person burns books. Does he really deserve to live? | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 29ee54e | But perhaps the answer is to stop writing altogether, for when I do write, even now as I write this very sentence, this very word, I am aware of a ghost reader who leans over my shoulder watching my pen, who twists my words and perverts my meaning, and makes me uncomfortable in the privacy of my own thoughts. It is very aggravating to be presented to oneself in a light so different from the familiar one, even when it is clearly a false ligh.. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 861e45f | if you can only learn to see them. The truth had been there all along, only now had I seen | Diane Setterfield | ||
| fc96dba | Her presence could be divined in any number of ways by those who had eyes to see. Yet she was not seen. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 35db9cc | My words flew like birds into a pane of glass. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 0a2aa33 | Oh, my poor child." I felt the touch of Miss Winter's hand on my shoulder, and while I cried over the corpses of my broken words, her hand remained there, lightly." | Diane Setterfield | ||
| b111e26 | I thought nothing. The surface of my mind was perfectly still. But under the surface there was a shifting and a stirring. I felt the great swell of the undercurrent. For years a wreck had sat in the depths, a rusting vessel with its cargo of bones. Now it shifted. I had disturbed it, and it created a turbulence that lifted clouds of sand from the seabed, motes of grit swirling wildly in the dark disturbed water. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 7f2fa54 | Emmeline didn't call me anything. She didn't need to, for I was always there. You only need names for the absent. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 87a2621 | He was the first of my ghosts. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 438a76a | As we drove into Harrow-gate, the atmosphere in the car was heavy with Miss Winter's oppressive silence. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 37890da | There was nothing to see; the mist that hung in the air made everything invisible that was more than a short distance away. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 8cb3444 | followed the thread of his voice in the air. | Diane Setterfield | ||
| 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 |