Diane Setterfield

“Sarà che le emozioni hanno un odore, o un sapore; sarà che le trasmettiamo inconsapevolmente inviando vibrazioni nell'aria.”

“I have closed my study door on the world and shut myself away with people of my imagination. For nearly sixty years I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist. I have peeped shamelessly into hearts and bathroom closets. I have leaned over shoulders to follow the movements of quills as they write love letters, wills and confessions. I have watched as lovers love, murderers murder and childern play their make-believe. Prisons and brothels have opened their doors to me; galleons and camel trains have transported me across sea and sand; centuries and continents have fallen away at my bidding. I have spied upon the misdeeds of the mighty and witnessed the nobility of the meek. I have bent so low over sleepers in their beds that they might have felt my breath on their faces. I have seen their dreams.”

“Certainly for myself I believe I would always wish to know the truth, but then I also wish to never have to face a truth I cannot bear. Being able to look truth in the face might be brave, or it might just mean you have been lucky in the truth you were dealt.”

“Silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words.”

“Of course I recognized it. How could I not, for I had read it goodness knows how many times. 'Jane Eyre,' I said wonderingly. 'You recognized it? Yes, it is. I asked a man in a library. It's by Charlotte someone. She had a lot of sisters, apparently.”

“Writing is more about discovery than invention.”

“He would go to the bakery for a cake, and somewhere in the shop-I had never discovered where; it was one of the few secrets I had not fathomed-he kept a candle, which came out on this day every year, was lit, and which I blew out, with as good an impression of happiness as I could muster. Then we ate the cake, with tea, and settled down to quiet digestion and cataloging.”

“But pecuniary interest is clearly not in your nature. How quaint. I have written about people who don't care for money, but I never expected to meet one. Therefor I conclude that the difficulty concerns integrity. People whose lives are not balanced by a healthy love of money suffer from an appauling obsession with personal integrity." - Vida Winter”

“When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don’t expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.”

“Ordinary people, untwins, seek their soulmate, take lovers, marry. Tormented by their incompleteness they strive to be part of a pair.”

“She could not read a book for fear of the feelings she might find in it.”

“But only when it was too late did they realize the price they must pay for escaping their destiny. Every Happy Ever After was tainted. Fate, at first so amenable, so reasonable, so open to negotiation, ends up by exacting a cruel revenge for happiness.”

“Todos los niños mitifican su nacimiento. Es un rasgo universal. ¿Quieres conocer a alguien? ¿Su corazón, su mente, su alma? Pídele que te hable de cuando nació. Lo que te cuente no será la verdad: será una historia. Y nada es tan revelador como una historia.Vida Winter, Cuentos de cambio y desesperación.”

“I shall start at the beginning. Though of course, the beginning is never where you think it is.”

“She had suffered longer, and she had suffered more. Each second was agony in the first weeks. She was like an amputee in the days before anesthesia, half crazed with pain, astounded that the human body could feel so much and not die of it. But slowly, cell by painful cell, she began to mend. There came a time when it was no longer her whole body that burned with pain but only her heart. And then there came a time when even her heart was able, for a time at least, to feel other emotions besides grief... she learned how to exist apart.”

“Todos tenemos nuestros dolores, y aunque la forma, el peso y las dimensiones del dolor son diferentes para cada persona, el color del dolor es común a todos nosotros.”

“... [They] took it upon themselves to start the laborious process of cranking up life again, after death has stopped us all in its tracks.”

“Miss Lea, it doesn't do to get attached to these secondary characters. It's not their story.”

“But there can be no secrets in a house where there are children.”

“Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating.”

“«Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Los casos de Sherlock Holmes. Tomar diez páginas, dos veces al día, hasta finalizar el tratamiento».”

“Tú estás viva; pero estar viva no es lo mismo que vivir.”

“Un nacimiento no es, en realidad, una introducción. Nuestra vida, cuando empieza, no es realmente nuestra, sino la continuación de la historia de otro.”

“Le damos tanta importancia a nuestra propia vida que tendemos a creer que su historia comienza con nuestro nacimiento. Primero no había nada, entonces nací yo... Pero no es así. Las vidas humanas no son pedazos de cuerda que podemos separar del nudo que forman con otros pedazos de cuerda para enderezarnos. Las familias son tejidos. Resulta imposible tocar una parte sin hacer vibrar el resto. Resulta imposible comprender una parte sin poseer una visión del conjunto. - Vida Winter”

“Nos acostumbramos tanto a nuestros propios horrores que olvidamos el efecto que pueden tener en otras personas.”

“...when people are expecting to see nothing that is usually what they see.”

“La gente desaparece cuando muere. La voz, la risa, el calor de su aliento, la carne y finalmente los huesos. Todo recuerdo vivo de ella termina. Es algo terrible y natural al mismo tiempo. Sin embargo, hay individuos que se salvan de esa aniquilación, pues siguen existiendo en los libros que escribieron. Podemos volver a descubrirlos. Su humor,el tono de su voz, su estado de ánimo. A través de la palabra escrita pueden enojarte o alegrarte. Pueden consolarte, pueden desconcertarte, pueden cambiarte. Y todo eso pese a estar muertos. Como moscas en ámbar, como cadáveres congelados en el hielo, eso que según las leyes de la naturaleza debería desaparecer se conserva por el milagro de la tinta sobre el papel. Es una suerte de magia.”

“Las palabras tienen algo especial. En manos expertas, manipuladas con destreza, nos convierten en sus prisioneros. Se enredan en nuestros brazos como tela de araña y en cuanto estamos tan embelesados que no podemos movernos, nos perforan la piel, se infiltran en la sangre, adormecen el pensamiento. Y ya dentro de nosotros ejercen su magia.”

“Sin duda, una buena historia deslumbra mucho más que un pedazo de verdad.”

“Cuando el miedo y el frío hacen de ti una estatua en tu propia cama, no ansíes que la Verdad pura y dura acuda en tu auxilio. Lo que necesitas es el mullido consuelo de un relato. La protección balsámica, adormecedora, de una mentira.”

“After a great many questions I eventually ascertained that he is suffering from some kind of disorder of the mind. Is there anything more sorrowful than a brain whose proper function has been disrupted?”

“I was in a kind of no-man's-land, a place between places. The mind plays all sorts of tricks, gets up to all kinds of things while we ourselves are slumbering in a white zone that looks for all the world like inattention to the onlooker.”

“There are times when the human face and body can express the yearning of the heart so accurately that you can, as they say, read them like a book. Do not abandon me.”

“Tragedy alters everything.”

“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.”

“People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think of them.”

“I looked out into the dead garden. Against the fading light, my shadow hovered in the glass, looking into the dead room. What did she make of us? I wondered. What did she think of our attempts to persuade ourselves that this was life and that we were really living it?”

“I reached for the prescription. In a vigorous scrawl, he inked: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. Take ten pages, twice a day, till end of course.”

“Though my appetite for food grew frail, my hunger for books was constant.”

“What is it that allows human beings to see through each other's pretendings? For I understood quite clearly in that moment that she was anxious. Perhaps emotions have a smell or a taste; perhaps we transmit them unknowingly by vibrations in the air. Whatever the means, I knew just as surely that it was nothing about me in particular that alarmed her, but only the fact that I had come and was a stranger.”

“The funeral was over, at last I could cry. Except that I couldn't. My tears, kept in too long, had fossilized. They would have to stay in forever now.”

“My story - my own personal story - ended before my writing began. Storytelling has only ever been a way of filling in the time since everything finished.”

“Prescription: 'Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. Take ten pages, twice a day, til end of course.”

“In this cruel world kindness should always be repaid.”

“We live like latecomers to the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the begging from the shape of later events.”

“L'appetit vient en mangeant. Appetite comes by eating. Your appetite will come back, but it must be met halfway. You must want it to come.”

“A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.”

“Rebuilt in Victorian times, it retained the modesty of its medieval origins. Small and neat, its spire indicated the direction of heaven without trying to pierce a hole in it.”

“What better place to kill time than a library?”

“Boys do not leave their boyhood behind when they leave off their school uniform.”