Quotes from The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

We just finished reading The Thirteenth Tale for our book club and it was a great read! I came away with many favorite bits from the intriguing mystery.

"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 humor, 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. They can alter 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 off ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic." ~page 17

"I was distracted: my thumb and right index finger were sending me a message: Not many pages left." ~page 27

"I remembered the Thirteen Tales that took possession of me with its first words and held me captive all night. I wanted to be held hostage again." ~page 31

"Other people call it the imagination. I think of it as a compost heap. Every so often I take an idea, plant it in the compost, and wait. It feeds on that black stuff that used to be a life, takes its energy for its own. It germinates. Takes root. Produces shoots. And so and and so forth, until one fine day I have a story or a novel." ~page 46

"I have closed my study door on the world and shut myself away with people of my imagination. For nearly sixty years I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist. I have peeped shamelessly into hearts and bathroom closets. I have leaned over shoulders to follow the movements of quills as they write love letters, wills and confessions. I have watched as lovers love, murderers murder and children play their make-believe. Prisons and brothels have opened their doors to me; galleons and camel trains have transported me across sea and sand; centuries and continents have fallen away at my bidding. I have spied upon the misdeeds of the mighty and witnessed the nobility of the meek. I have bent so low over sleepers in their beds that they might have felt my breath on their faces. I have seen their dreams." ~page 113

"His voice had the unmistakable lightness of someone telling something extremely important. A story so cherished it had to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic." ~page 220

"Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with items and themes -characters even- caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you." ~page 290

"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 at the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the beginning from the shape of later events." ~page 357

"'I know,' he said. 'I know.' He didn't know, of course. Not really. And yet that was what he said, and I was soothed to hear it. For I knew what he meant. We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, weight and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all. 'I know,' he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did." ~page 388-389

Plus, the last sentence was awesome, which I won't share with you here. It won't mean as much until after you've read the story in its entirety. Read it!

Engrossed,
Dawn