Magill

“It was better to tell such stories close to the river than in a drawing room. Words accumulate indoors, trapped by walls and ceilings. The weight of what has been said can lie heavily on what might yet be said and suffocate it. By the river the air carries the story on a journey: one sentence drifts away and makes way for the next.”
― Diane Setterfield, Once Upon a River

“Well, then,” the cressman concluded sagely, “just ’cause a thing’s impossible don’t mean it can’t happen.”
― Diane Setterfield, Once Upon a River

“A curtain was drawn back in every man's inner theater and their storytelling minds got to work.”
― Diane Setterfield, Once Upon a River

“They were collectors of words the same way so many of the gravel diggers were collectors of fossils. They kept an ear constantly alert for them, the rare, the unusual, the unique.”
― Diane Setterfield, Once Upon a River