Diane Setterfield Quotes

Ordinary people don't know how much books can mean to someone who's cooped up.

This book taught me, once and for all, how easily you can escape this world with the help of words! You can find friends between the pages of a book, wonderful friends.

a good book can make an almost impossible existence, liveable ( from 'the luck of the word' )

I entrench myself in my books equally against sorrow and the weather.

Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.

Mother used to say escape is never further than the nearest book. Well, Mumsy, no, not really. Your beloved large-print sagas of rags, riches, and heartbreak were no camouflage against the miseries trained on you by the tennis ball launcher of life, were they? But, yes, Mum, there again, you have a point. Books don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.

His books were the closest thing he had to furniture and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.

For some of us, good books and beautiful writing are our ultimate solace, even more comforting than exquisite food.

Reading was my escape growing up in Ohio. Both of my parents lost their jobs when I was a teen, and it was hard. But I always had my books. Reading gave me a way of living different lives.

Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.

From an early age she had developed the art of being alone and generally preferred her own company to anyone else’s. She read books at enormous speed and judged them entirely on her ability to remove her from her material surroundings. In almost all the unhappiest days of her life she had been able to escape from her own inner world by living temporarily in someone else’s, and on the two or three occasions that she had been too upset to concentrate she had been desolate.

He was fond of books, for they are cool and sure friends

I have my books and my poetry to protect me

From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood.

Books are a guide in youth, and an entertainment for age. They support us under solitude, and keep us from being a burden to ourselves. They help us to forget the crossness of men and things, compose our cares and our passions, and lay our disappointments asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride or design in their conversation.

Half the time I pick up a book, that's what I'm trying to get.

This girl shivers and crawls under the covers with all her clothes on and falls into an overdue library book, a faerie story with rats and marrow and burning curses. The sentences build a fence around her, a Times Roman 10-point barricade, to keep the thorny voices in her head from getting too close.

I think books were my salvation, they saved me from being miserable.

…books are always good company if you have the right sort. Let me pick out some for you.' And Mrs. Jo made a bee-line to the well-laden shelves, which were the joy of her heart and the comfort of her life.

Books—they weren't ladders out of the abyss, but they were companions.

Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people-- people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.

Books afford the surest relief in the most melancholy moments.

This was my only and my constant comfort. When I think of it, the picture always rises in my mind, of a summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life.

I find reading to be a delight, a source of comfort, a way to explore.

As long as I'm reading, I'm at home.