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121 " Her eyes were too full of beauty to leave room for anything so mundane as intelligence. "
― Diane Setterfield , The Thirteenth Tale
122 " Las palabras tienen algo especial. En manos expertas, manipuladas con destreza, nos convierten en sus prisioneros. Se enredan en nuestros brazos como tela de araña y en cuanto estamos tan embelesados que no podemos movernos, nos perforan la piel, se infiltran en la sangre, adormecen el pensamiento. Y ya dentro de nosotros ejercen su magia. "
123 " A curtain was drawn back in every man's inner theater and their storytelling minds got to work. "
― Diane Setterfield , Once Upon a River
124 " Time was of the essence. 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. "
125 " His confidences, this mist, had led us unexpectedly onto a peninsula of intimacy, and I found myself on the brink of telling what I had never told anyone before. The words flew ready-formed into my head, organized themselves instantly into sentences, long strings of sentences, bursting with impatience to fly from my tongue. As if they had spent years planning for this moment. "
126 " I was in a kind of no-man's-land, a place between places. The mind plays all sorts of tricks, gets up to all kinds of things while we ourselves are slumbering in a white zone that looks for all the world like inattention to the onlooker. "
127 " Silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. "
128 " He has explained why it is that ambiguity touches his heart more nearly than the death and marriage style of finish that i prefer. "
129 " After a great many questions I eventually ascertained that he is suffering from some kind of disorder of the mind. Is there anything more sorrowful than a brain whose proper function has been disrupted? "
130 " on a summer day winter always seems like something you have dreamt or heard spoken of and not a thing you have lived. "
131 " Why do they spend their time with cows when they are surely the more natural companions to unicorns, griffins and dragons? The answer is that the rook lives as he wishes. When he wants the entertainment of human company he is more likely to seek out the drunken poet or the wild-eyed crone than a damsel with a cornet. "
― Diane Setterfield , Bellman & Black
132 " We live like latecomers to the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the begging from the shape of later events. "
133 " Me pasé la mañana luchando con la sensación de volutas descarriadas de un mundo intentando filtrarse por las grietas de otro. ¿Conocéis la sensación de empezar un libro nuevo antes de que el recuerdo del último haya tenido tiempo de cerrarse detrás de vosotros? Deja uno el libro anterior con ideas y temas —personajes incluso— atrapados en las fibras de la ropa y cuando abre el libro nuevo siguen ahí. "
134 " Miracle” was the word Jonathan had pronounced, and they tested it on their own tongues. They were used to it in the Bible, where it meant impossible things that happened an impossibly long time ago in places so far away from here that they might as well not exist. Here in the inn it applied to the laughably improbable chance that the boat mender would ever pay his slate in full: now that would be a miracle all right. But tonight, at winter solstice in the Swan at Radcot, the word had a different weight. "
135 " So they became friends, the way old married couples often do, and enjoyed the tender loyalty that awaits the lucky on the other side of passion, without ever living the passion itself. "
136 " And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head. 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. For it must be very lonely being dead. "
137 " Readers," continued Miss Winter, "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. That's why I couldn't have journalists and biographers rummaging around in my past, retrieving bits and pieces of it, preserving it in their words. To write my books, I needed my past left in peace, for time to do its work. "
138 " I pushed my pile of papers to one side, stroked Shadow and stared into the fire, longing for the comfort of a story where everything had been planned well in advance, where the confusion of the middle was invented only for my enjoyment, and where I could measure how far away the solution was by feeling the thickness of pages still to come. I had no idea how many pages it would take to complete the story of Emmeline and Adeline, nor even whether there would be time to complete it. "
139 " He couldn’t go on. He went on. "
140 " endings that are muted, but which echo longer in the memory than louder, more explosive denouements. "