Favourite Quote From A Book
I am actually going to include more than one quote here, but I think it should be acceptable because they are all from the same book – The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield:
Quote 1:
“What succour, 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 a 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-bound 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.”
Quote 2:
“People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humour, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. All this even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved.”
Quote 3:
“There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.”
Quote 4:
“Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born…yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole.”
Related articles
- Book & Author Quips & Quotes: Diane Setterfield (dragonflydithers.wordpress.com)
- Modern Gothic: The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield (readmorebooks.wordpress.com)
- A Book A Month (May): The Thirteenth Tale (dreamtillgreen.com)
- The Thirteenth Tale (alicemcnamara.com)
Categories: Challenge Responses
Rafferty's Rules is Closing Down 
What are your thoughts?