The Thirteenth Tale

by Diane Setterfield

I’ve nothing against people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions.

A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down.

He has explained why it is that ambiguity touches his heart more nearly than the death and marriage style of finish that I prefer.

Light, empty chat, produced to keep silence at bay, silence in which her demons lived.

People whose lives are not balanced by a healthy love of money suffer from an appalling obsession with personal integrity.’

One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what’s left when you’ve failed at everything else.

So, tell me about yourself. What are your favourite books? What do you dream about? Whom do you love?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I heard her say. ‘One gets so used to one’s own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people.’

‘Nice weather for a picnic,’ she said, and her husband, in the way of husbands, did not see the connection.

Mrs Maudsley nodded, which was her way of disagreeing with her husband, though he didn’t know

These were people who couldn’t keep their flower vases topped up. No wonder their children were misbehaving!

‘When one is nothing, one invents. It fills a void.’

It is an odd thing to look into the face of a boy who is not quite yet a man, in search of the features of an old woman, his daughter.

And the plea that had so moved me – Tell me the truth – had been uttered by a man who was not even real.

two leaves caught up in the same breeze.

People hardly ever notice me for long enough to ask me personal questions.

This incomer meant a fresh pair of eyes, a fresh pair of ears, in a house where no one had looked or listened properly for years. John-the-dig, habituated to secrecy, foresaw trouble.

(he enjoyed having his wife listen to him; it inspired him to greater eloquence),

All her strength was in her will, and when that was gone, the rest was insubstantial.

Things that clearly made sense to other people didn’t always make sense to her.

If you dazzle a man with green eyes, he will be so hypnotized that he won’t notice there is someone inside the eyes spying on him.

Your appetite will come back. But you must meet it halfway.

but he is a man, hence cannot see how tiresome it is to have explained at length what one has already fully understood.

An unrested mind is prone to wander into unfruitful avenues; it is nothing that a good night’s sleep cannot cure.

We live like latecomers at the theatre: we must catch up as best we can, divining the beginning from the shape of later events.

Emmeline didn’t call me anything. She didn’t need to, for I was always there. You only need names for the absent.’