Diane Setterfield Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“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 thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.”
-- Diane SetterfieldSource : "The Thirteenth Tale". Book by Diane Setterfield, 2006.
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“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”
-- Diane SetterfieldSource : "A Handbook of the Cornish Language". Book by Henry Jenner, 1904.
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“I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone.”
-- Diane SetterfieldSource : Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.14, Simon and Schuster
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“For me to see is to read. It has always been that way.”
-- Diane SetterfieldSource : Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.20, Simon and Schuster
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“Of course I loved books more than people.”
-- Diane SetterfieldSource : Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale”, p.295, Simon and Schuster
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“A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.”
-- Diane SetterfieldSource : Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.6, Simon and Schuster
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“But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.”
-- Diane SetterfieldSource : Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.300, Simon and Schuster
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“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 SetterfieldSource : Diane Setterfield (2006). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.32, Simon and Schuster
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“There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.”
-- Diane SetterfieldSource : Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.29, Simon and Schuster
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“Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in 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 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 SetterfieldSource : Diane Setterfield (2011). “The Thirteenth Tale”, p.24, Hachette UK
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“When one is nothing, one invents. It fills a void.”
-- Diane SetterfieldSource : Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.115, Simon and Schuster
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“What better place to kill time than a library?”
-- Diane SetterfieldSource : Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.41, Simon and Schuster
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“I read *old* novels. The reason is simple. I prefer proper endings.”
-- Diane Setterfield -
“There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner.”
-- Diane Setterfield -
“My genius is not so frail a thing that it cowers from the dirty fingers of newspapernen.”
-- Diane Setterfield -
“In this cruel world kindness should always be repaid.”
-- Diane Setterfield -
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“You are suffering from an ailment that affects ladies of romantic imaginations. Symptoms include fainting, weariness, loss of appetite, low spirits. While on one level the crisis can be ascribed to wandering about in freezing rain without the benefit of adequate waterproofing, the deeper cause is more likely to be found in some emotional trauma. However, unlike the heroines of your favorite novels, your constitution has not been weakened by the privations of life in earlier, harsher centuries. No tuberculosis, no childhood polio, no unhygienic living conditions. You'll survive.' " pg. 303”
-- Diane Setterfield -
“The tears I gratified him with were fake ones. Ones that set off my green eyes the way diamonds set off emeralds. And it worked. If you dazzled a man with green eyes, he will be so hypnotized that he won’t notice there is someone inside the eyes spying on him. – Vida Winters Page 268”
-- Diane Setterfield -
“Boys do not leave their boyhood behind when they leave off their school uniform.”
-- Diane Setterfield -
“People whose lives are not balanced by a healthy love of money suffer from an appalling obsession with personal integrity.”
-- Diane SetterfieldSource : Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.44, Simon and Schuster
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“To anyone who took the trouble to look, I was plainly visible, but when people are expecting to see nothing, that is usually what they see.”
-- Diane Setterfield -
“Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother, but the rest of the time there was none. This story is about one of those other times.”
-- Diane SetterfieldSource : Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale”, p.492, Simon and Schuster
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“Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words on the other hand, were a lifeline. They left their hushed rhythm behind, a counter to the slow in and out of Emmeline's breathing.”
-- 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 SetterfieldSource : Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale”, p.269, Simon and Schuster
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“Prescription: 'Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. Take ten pages, twice a day, til end of course.”
-- Diane Setterfield -
“There are cultures in which it is believed that a name contains all a persons 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 ones own or someone else's is to invite jeopardy. This it seemed was such a name.”
-- Diane Setterfield -
“Readers are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. it must be allowed to decay.”
-- Diane Setterfield -
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“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.”
-- Diane Setterfield -
“People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think of them.”
-- Diane Setterfield
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