Hagia Sofia > Hagia's Quotes

“Of course I loved books more than people.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“All children mythologise their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t be the truth: it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“What better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books? ”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else's story.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“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. ”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“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. - Vida Winter”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother, but the rest of the time there was none. This story is about one of those other times.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“Sometimes when you open the door to the past, what you confront is your destiny.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“Reading can be dangerous.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“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.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“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 the ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“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.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“Great moves of God are usually preceded by simple acts of obedience.”
― Steven Furtick

“One of the Enemy's most effective strategies is to get you to focus on what you don't have, what you used to have, or what someone else has that you wish you had. He does this to keep you from looking around and asking, "God, what can You do through what I have?”
― Steven Furtick, Greater: Dream Bigger. Start Smaller. Ignite God's Vision for Your Life.