Diane Setterfield

His voice had the unmistakable lightness of someone telling something extremely important.

Any governess, after the few hours I have had in this house, would have a full and clearpicture of the task awaiting her, but he is a man, hence cannot see how tiresome it is to have explained at length what one has already fully understood.

Reading can be dangerous.)

When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails?

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. When I at last woke up to myself, I could only guess what had been going on in the darkness of my unconsciousness.

At these times I stayed mum, dumbstruck by the momentary collision of two worlds that were otherwise so entirely apart.

For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down.

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.

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.

As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. I clean them, do minor repairs, keep them in good order. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head. 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. For it must be very lonely being dead.