Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale Quotes

I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone.

For me to see is to read. It has always been that way.

Of course I loved books more than people.

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

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.

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

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.

What better place to kill time than a library?

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

My genius is not so frail a thing that it cowers from the dirty fingers of newspapernen.

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

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

For at eight o’clock the world came to an end. It was reading time. The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours.

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

Politeness. Being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else.

In speech he stretched out his vowel sounds to give his mouth a rest before the next consonant.

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

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

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