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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 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 | ||
| 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 |