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
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
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.
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
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.
believe taken mean
The doctor's wife wasn't a bad woman. She was sufficiently convinced of her own importance to believe that God actually did watch everything she did and listen to everything she said, and she was too taken up with rooting out the pride she was prone to feeling in her own holiness to notice any other failings she might have had. She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.
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.
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.
book faces clients
Our clients' faces, with the customary outward paleness and inner glow of the book lover.
mean realizing ill
She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.
mother father moving
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.
beautiful eye laughing
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.
morning book blue
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.
lonely
For it must be very lonely being dead.
book choices way
What better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books?