Diane Setterfield Stories Quotations

I see people as haunted by the selves they don't know... I don't have children, but I have nieces and nephews, and one thing I notice is how fascinated they are by stories of their lives before they can remember.

Everybody has a story. It's like families. You might not know who they are, might have lost them, but they exist all the same. You might drift apart or you might turn your back on them, but you can't say you haven't got them. Same goes for stories.

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.

Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother, but the rest of the time there was none. This story is about one of those other times.

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.