Diane Setterfield Quotes

You leave the previous book with idea's and themes - characters even - caught in the fibers of your clothing - and when you open a new book, they are still with you.

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

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

...but he is a man, hence cannot see how tiresome it is to have explained at length what one has already fully understood.

People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think of them.

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 left when you've failed at everything else. People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think about them.

No matter how banal the contents, there is always something that touches me. For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down.

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? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don't expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.