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Susan Hill QUOTES

Susan Hill QUOTES

1 " Fast reading of a great novel will get us the plot. It will get us names, a shadowy idea of characters, a sketch of settings. It will not get us subtleties, small differentiations, depth of emotion and observation, multilayered human experience, the appreciation of simile and metaphor, any sense of context, any comparison with other novels, other writers. Fast reading will not get us cadence and complexities of style and language. It will not get us anything that enters not just the conscious mind but the unconscious. It will not allow the book to burrow down into our memory and become part of ourselves, the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom and vicarious experience which helps to form us as complete human beings. It will not develop our awareness or add to the sum of our knowledge and intelligence. Read parts of a newspaper quickly or an encyclopaedia entry, or a fast-food thriller, but do not insult yourself or a book which has been created with its author's painstakingly acquired skill and effort, by seeing how fast you can dispose of it. "

― Susan Hill , Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home

2 " I love the book. I love the feel of a book in my hands, the compactness of it, the shape, the size. I love the feel of paper. The sound it makes when I turn a page. I love the beauty of print on paper, the patterns, the shapes, the fonts. I am astonished by the versatility and practicality of The Book. It is so simple. It is so fit for its purpose. It may give me mere content, but no e-reader will ever give me that sort of added pleasure. "

― Susan Hill , Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home

3 " I go downstairs and the books blink at me from the shelves. Or stare. In a trick of the light, a row of them seems to shift very slightly, like a curtain blown by the breeze through an open window. Red is next to blue is next to cream is adjacent to beige. But when I look again, cream is next to green is next to black. A tall book shelters a small book, a huge Folio bullies a cowering line of Quartos. A child's nursery rhyme book does not have the language in which to speak to a Latin dictionary. Chaucer does not know the words in which Henry James communicates but here they are forced to live together, forever speechless. "

― Susan Hill , Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home

4 " I had changed, and gone on changing, but I did not fully remember how it had begun, or understand why. "

― Susan Hill , Mrs de Winter

5 " Small children will talk to anyone, once the guard of shyness has fallen, and they have, like the elderly, a sense of immediacy, a need to say or do something, now, now, the minute it is thought of, combined with that other sense, of the complete irrelevance of time. "

― Susan Hill , The Magic Apple Tree: A Country Year

6 " We make our own destiny. "

― Susan Hill , Mrs de Winter

7 " Some people make tunes, but it is lines that run like moving messages through my head. Whatever else I am saying and doing often has no bearing on this inner, verbal life. "

― Susan Hill , The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read: and Other Stories

8 " I was frightened of myself, I seemed to have no control over my thoughts and feelings, it was like a sort of madness... "

― Susan Hill , Mrs de Winter

9 " They told of dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight, of locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tapping at casements, of howlings and shriekings, groanings and scuttlings and the clanking of chains, of hooded monks and headless horseman, swirling mists and sudden winds, insubstantial specters and sheeted creatures, vampires and bloodhounds, bats and rats and spiders, of men found at dawn and women turned white-haired and raving lunatic, and of vanished corpses and curses upon heirs. "

― Susan Hill

10 " I have sat here at my desk, day after day, night after night, a blank sheet of paper before me, unable to lift my pen, trembling and weeping too. "

― Susan Hill , The Woman in Black

11 " It is okay to climb as long as you are not afraid, because being afraid is what made you fall "

― Susan Hill , I'm the King of the Castle

12 " Here, in the garden at night, it is another world, strange and yet friendly and familiar, never frightening. There is such quietness, such sweetness, such refreshment.

Close your eyes. Breathe in again, smell everything mingled together, flowers and earth and leaves and grass. Smell the night.

Listen. Nothing at all. Silence, rushing like the sea in your ears.

However small and sparse the garden, and wherever it is, even inside a great city, if something grows there, it is a magic place by night.

Leave it, walk quietly back towards the lights that shine out of the house. You will take its magic with you.

Now, you will sleep. "

― Susan Hill , Through the Garden Gate

13 " The moment had gone. I carried my secrets still with me, and they were hard, heavy, bitter things. "

― Susan Hill , Mrs de Winter

14 " We are not punished for our sins, we are punished by them. We can't live with guilt for the whole of our lives.. "

― Susan Hill , Mrs de Winter

15 " I felt dead and sick inside. "

― Susan Hill , Mrs de Winter

16 " I walked up the stairs and hesitated at the open door. "

― Susan Hill , The Small Hand

17 " Your world may think what it chooses...but really, opinion and gossip count for nothing at all against truth... "

― Susan Hill , Mrs de Winter

18 " Books help to form us. If you cut me open, you will find volume after volume, page after page, the contents of every one I have ever read, somehow transmuted and transformed into me. Alice in Wonderland. the Magic Faraway Tree. The Hound of the Baskervilles. The Book of Job. Bleak House. Wuthering Heights. The Complete Poems of W H Auden. The Tale of Mr Tod. Howard''s End. What a strange person I must be. But if the books I have read have helped to form me, then probably nobody else who ever lived has read exactly the same books, all the same books and only the same books as me. So just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA. "

― Susan Hill , Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home

19 " For I see that then I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence, once lost, is lost forever. "

― Susan Hill , The Woman in Black

20 " A man may be accused of cowardice for fleeing away from all manner of physical dangers but when things supernatural, insubstantial and inexplicable threaten not only his safety and well-being but his sanity, his innermost soul, then retreat is not a sign of weakness but the most prudent course. "

― Susan Hill , The Woman in Black