Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Familes 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

Diane Setterfield Quotes

But there can be no secrets in a house where there are children.

— Diane Setterfield

I shall start at the beginning. Though of coarse, the beginning is never where you think it is.

— Diane Setterfield

She could not read a book for fear of the feelings she might find in it.

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

There was no single moment when I thought, Aha! What a great idea! Rather there was a slow and gradual accumulation of numerous small ideas.

— Diane Setterfield

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

— Diane Setterfield

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

I’ve nothing against people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions.

— Diane Setterfield

What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney?

— Diane Setterfield

One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what’s left when you’ve failed at everything else.

— Diane Setterfield

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.

— Diane Setterfield

People whose lives are not balanced by a healthy love of money suffer from an appalling obsession with personal integrity.

— Diane Setterfield

Boys do not leave their boyhood behind when they leave off their school uniform.

— 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

Fate, at first so amenable, so reasonable, so open to negotiation, ends up by exacting a cruel revenge for happiness.

— Diane Setterfield

My mother and I were like two continents moving slowly but inexorably apart; my father, the bridge builder, constantly extending the fragile edifice he had constructed to connect us.

— Diane Setterfield

But she had that laugh, and the sound of it was so beautiful that when you heard it, it was as if your eyes saw her through your ears and she was transformed.

— Diane Setterfield

The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours. Against the blue candlewick bedspread the white pages of my open book, illuminated by a circle of lamplight, were the gateway to another world.

— Diane Setterfield

For it must be very lonely being dead.

— Diane Setterfield

She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.

— Diane Setterfield
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