Diane Setterfield

Father spends a great deal of time composing letters.

Tell me the truth. The words from the letter were trapped in my head, trapped, it seemed, beneath the sloping ceiling of my attic flat, like a bird that has got in down the chimney.

For at eight o’clock the world came to an end. It was reading time

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.

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

There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere

When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books.

Winter. I looked out of the window for inspiration. Behind my writer’s ghost, dark branches stretched naked across the darkening sky, and the flower beds were bare black soil. The glass was no protection against the chill; despite the gas fire, the room seemed filled with bleak despair. What did winter mean to me? One thing only: death

Tragedy alters everything.

I was born, and the woman in the wedding photo disappeared.

She might have looked like a potato, but there was nothing that girl couldn't do, once she put her mind to it.