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.
Diane SetterfieldOne gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people.
Diane SetterfieldI know there are people who don't read fiction at all, and I find it hard to understand how they can bear to be inside the same head all the time.
Diane SetterfieldOne needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else.
Diane SetterfieldWhen 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.
Diane SetterfieldYou are suffering from an ailment that affects ladies of romantic imaginations. Symptoms include fainting, weariness, loss of appetite, low spirits. While on one level the crisis can be ascribed to wandering about in freezing rain without the benefit of adequate waterproofing, the deeper cause is more likely to be found in some emotional trauma. However, unlike the heroines of your favorite novels, your constitution has not been weakened by the privations of life in earlier, harsher centuries. No tuberculosis, no childhood polio, no unhygienic living conditions. You'll survive.' " pg. 303
Diane Setterfield