Diane Setterfield
Diane Setterfield
Diane Setterfieldis 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...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth22 August 1964
book faces clients
Our clients' faces, with the customary outward paleness and inner glow of the book lover.
dark wind bears
What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney?
stories birth continuation
A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else's story.
nice needs talent
One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else.
winter thinking important
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. - Vida Winter
morning book reading
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.
children winter events
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 catch up as best we can, divining the begging from the shape of later events. - Vida Winter
running wall lying
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.
children heart soul
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.
mean realizing ill
She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.
reading dangerous
Reading can be dangerous.
kindness world should
In this cruel world kindness should always be repaid.
past destiny doors
Sometimes when you open the door to the past, what you confront is your destiny.
people looks trouble
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.