Diane Setterfield

Winter. I looked out of the window for inspiration. Behind my writer’s ghost, dark branches stretched naked across the darkening sky, and the flower beds were bare black soil. The glass was no protection against the chill; despite the gas fire, the room seemed filled with bleak despair. What did winter mean to me? One thing only: death

Tragedy alters everything.

I was born, and the woman in the wedding photo disappeared.

She might have looked like a potato, but there was nothing that girl couldn't do, once she put her mind to it.

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.