Diane Setterfield said this quote

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

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

... [They] took it upon themselves to start the laborious process of cranking up life again, after death has stopped us all in its tracks.

~ Diane Setterfield

A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

~ Diane Setterfield