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 SetterfieldI 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. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same.
Diane SetterfieldPeople whose lives are not balanced by a healthy love of money suffer from an appalling obsession with personal integrity.
Diane SetterfieldOne gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people.
Diane SetterfieldAll 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.
Diane Setterfield