Quote

opening the book, i inhaled. the smell of old books, so sharp, so dry you can taste it.

Diane Setterfield

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Diane Setterfield
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: August 22
Author
Writer
Book
Inhaled
Sharp
Dry
Opening
Smell
Taste
Books

More quotes by Diane Setterfield

Image
One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else.
Diane Setterfield
Image
There are cultures in which it is believed that a name contains all a persons mystical power. That a name should be known only to God and to the person who holds it and to very few privileged others. To pronounce such a name either ones own or someone else's is to invite jeopardy. This it seemed was such a name.
Diane Setterfield
Image
As for you, you are alive. But it's not the same as living.
Diane Setterfield
Image
For it must be very lonely being dead.
Diane Setterfield
Image
I 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
Diane Setterfield
Image
Reading can be dangerous.
Diane Setterfield
Image
My genius is not so frail a thing that it cowers from the dirty fingers of newspapernen.
Diane Setterfield
Image
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.
Diane Setterfield
Image
There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.
Diane Setterfield
Image
What better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books?
Diane Setterfield
Image
Our clients' faces, with the customary outward paleness and inner glow of the book lover.
Diane Setterfield
Image
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.
Diane Setterfield
Image
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.
Diane Setterfield
Image
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.
Diane Setterfield
Image
The tears I gratified him with were fake ones. Ones that set off my green eyes the way diamonds set off emeralds. And it worked. If you dazzled a man with green eyes, he will be so hypnotized that he won’t notice there is someone inside the eyes spying on him. – Vida Winters Page 268
Diane Setterfield
Image
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.
Diane Setterfield
Image
I 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 Setterfield
Image
Fate, at first so amenable, so reasonable, so open to negotiation, ends up by exacting a cruel revenge for happiness.
Diane Setterfield
Image
Boys do not leave their boyhood behind when they leave off their school uniform.
Diane Setterfield
Image
I shall start at the beginning. Though of coarse, the beginning is never where you think it is.
Diane Setterfield