The Thirteenth Tale Quotes

“People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in the ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“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, The Thirteenth Tale

“All 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, The Thirteenth Tale

“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. 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. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. When 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 Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“Of course I loved books more than people.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“What better place to kill time than a library?”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“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, The Thirteenth Tale

“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, The Thirteenth Tale

“What better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books? ”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“Politeness. Now there's a poor man's virtue if ever there was one. What's so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After all, it's easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else. People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think about them.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so. ”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“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, The Thirteenth Tale

“For me to see is to read. It has always been that way.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born...Yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole. - Vida Winter”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“As for you, you are alive. But it's not the same as living.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“Sometimes when you open the door to the past, what you confront is your destiny.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“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, The Thirteenth Tale

“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.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“I've nothing against people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours. Against the blue candlewick bedspread the white pages of my open book, illuminated by a circle of lamplight, were the gateway to another world.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“When 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 Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“Reading can be dangerous.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“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.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“One gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“When one is nothing, one invents. It fills a void.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“All my life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people I have known, all my memories, dreams, fantasies, everything I have ever read, all of that has been chucked onto the compost heap, where over time it has rotted down to a dark, rich, organic mulch. The process of cellular breakdown makes it unrecognizable. Other people call it the imagination. I think of it as a compost heap. Every so often I take an idea, plant it in the compost, and wait. It feeds on the black stuff that used to be a life, takes its energy for its own. It germinates,. Takes root. Produces shoots. And so on and so forth, until one fine day I have a story, or a novel....Readers are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale