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.
Diane SetterfieldTags: politeness ambition inoffensiveness
Still in my coat and hat, I sank onto the stair to read the letter. (I never read without making sure I am in a secure position. I have been like this ever since the age of seven when, sitting on a high wall and reading The Water Babies, I was so seduced by the descriptions of underwater life that I unconsciously relaxed my muscles. Instead of being held buoyant by the water that so vividly surrounded me in my mind, I plummeted to the ground and knocked myself out. I can still feel the scar under my fringe now. Reading can be dangerous.)
Diane SetterfieldTags: reading
There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.
Diane SetterfieldTags: reading books re-reading
opening the book, i inhaled. the smell of old books, so sharp, so dry you can taste it.
Diane SetterfieldEvery so often I take out a volume and read a page or two. After all, reading is looking after in a manner of speaking. Though they're not old enough to be valuable for their age alone, nor important enough to be sought after by collectors, my charges are dear to me, even if, as often as not, they are as dull on the inside as on the outside. 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 SetterfieldOur clients' faces, with the customary outward paleness and inner glow of the book lover.
Diane SetterfieldTags: books
And sometimes then he sat with us for an hour or so, sharing our limbo, listening while I read. Books from any shelf, opened at any page, in which I would start and finish anywhere, mid-sentence sometimes. Wuthering Heights ran into Emma, which gave way to The Eustace Diamonds, which faded into Hard Times, which ceded to The Woman in White. Fragments. It didn't matter. Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words, on the other hand, were a lifeline.
Diane SetterfieldFor it must be very lonely being dead.
Diane SetterfieldSometimes you can know things. Things about yourself. Things from before you can remember.
Diane SetterfieldOne gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people.
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