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41 " I am human. Like all humans, I do not remember my birth. By the time we wake up to ourselves, we are little children, and our advent is something that happened an eternity ago, at the beginning of time. We live like latecomers to the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the begging from the shape of later events. - Vida Winter "
― Diane Setterfield , The Thirteenth Tale
42 " 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. "
43 " She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it. "
44 " My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. 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. "
45 " No matter how banal the contents, there is always something that touches me. For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down. "
― Diane Setterfield
46 " 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. "
47 " People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think of them. "
48 " ...but he is a man, hence cannot see how tiresome it is to have explained at length what one has already fully understood. "
49 " No one can hold you to a decision made in the middle of the night. "
50 " A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic. "
51 " You leave the previous book with idea's and themes - characters even - caught in the fibers of your clothing - and when you open a new book, they are still with you. "
52 " There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere. "
53 " What better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books? "
54 " 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. "
55 " 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. "
56 " As for you, you are alive. But it's not the same as living. "
57 " 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. "
58 " One gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people. "
59 " 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. "
60 " Reading can be dangerous. "