Quotes by Diane Setterfield

About Diane Setterfield:

Diane Setterfield is a British author whose 2006 debut novel, The Thirteenth Tale, became a New York Times No. 1 best-seller. It is written in the Gothic tradition, with echoes of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Her debut novel was turned into a television film.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Without the past to cast its long shadow, might you see the future more clearly?

Diane Setterfield

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 l...

Diane Setterfield

Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words, on the other hand, were a lifeline.

Diane Setterfield

All children mythologise 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

I am human. Like all humans, I do not remember my birth. By the time we wake up to ourselves, we are little children, and our advent is something that happened an eternity ago, at the beginning of time. We live like latecomers to the theater; we must...

Diane Setterfield

No one can hold you to a decision made in the middle of the night.

Diane Setterfield

There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.

Diane Setterfield

A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

Diane Setterfield

What better place to kill time than a library?

Diane Setterfield

When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic, yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.

Diane Setterfield

Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. And every day...

Diane Setterfield

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 o...

Diane Setterfield

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...

Diane Setterfield

Our clients' faces, with the customary outward paleness and inner glow of the book lover.

Diane Setterfield

As one tends to the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. I clean them, do minor repairs, keep them in good order. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head. ...

Diane Setterfield

There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your though...

Diane Setterfield

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 th...

Diane Setterfield

I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the rea...

Diane Setterfield

Of course I loved books more than people.

Diane Setterfield

A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.

Diane Setterfield

Author Bio

  • NameDiane Setterfield
  • DescriptionEnglish novelist
  • BornAugust 22, 1964
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionWoman Of Letters