Best 44 quotes of Susan Hill on MyQuotes

A book which is left on a shelf is a dead thing but it is also a chrysalis, an inanimate object packed with the potential to burst into new life.

A man may be accused of cowardice for fleeing away from all manner of physical dangers but when things supernatural, insubstantial and inexplicable threaten not only his safety and well-being but his sanity, his innermost soul, then retreat is not a sign of weakness but the most prudent course.

Books help to form us. If you cut me open, you will find volume after volume, page after page, the contents of every one I have ever read, somehow transmuted and transformed into me just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA.

Certainly with a book, people are going to be able to read it and give themselves permission to have that delicious feeling of being terrified because they're in a safe place while they're reading. That's what you can rely on as a writer, that people can let themselves be really frightened because they're really all right. Being frightened when you're not sure you're all right is a big difference.

For I see that then I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence, once lost, is lost forever.

Gardeners celebrate the influence of time. If we have had a late cold spring followed by a desiccating drought, autumn may be the most soft and golden for years; one poor season will sooner or later be compensated for by another.

Ghost stories ... tell us about things that lie hidden within all of us, and which lurk outside all around us.

I collect Victorian automata and coming across them in the dark does give you a little shudder.

I had not yet learned that we make our own destiny, it springs from within us. It is not the outward events but what we allow ourselves to make of them that count.

I like going into a school matinee. I like to be behind the stage because there's a spy-hole and what you see is the best moment in all theatre.

I love the book. I love the feel of a book in my hands, the compactness of it, the shape, the size. I love the feel of paper. The sound it makes when I turn a page. I love the beauty of print on paper, the patterns, the shapes, the fonts. I am astonished by the versatility and practicality of The Book. It is so simple. It is so fit for its purpose. It may give me mere content, but no e-reader will ever give me that sort of added pleasure.

I'm really quite hard to scare so it was about mining times when I have jumped, and what creeps me out.

I read a lot of ghost stories because I was writing a ghost story. I didn't think at all I was writing a horror or a thriller or whatever because it is about a ghost, whereas a horror film can be about aliens or things that rise out of the marsh that have no human shape.

It's just occurred to me that some horror films everybody laughs because they're so ridiculous and they're so frightening in a way, the filmmakers' are trying everything, that they just end up being funny.

My head reeled at the sheer and startling beauty, the wide, bare openness of it. The sense of space, the vastness of the sky above and on either side made my heart race, I would have travelled a thousand miles to see this. I had never imagined such a place.

Of all human activities, apart from the procreation of children, gardening is the most optimistic and hopeful. The gardener is by definition one who plans for and believes and trusts in a future, whether in the short or the longer term.

Some people make tunes, but it is lines that run like moving messages through my head. Whatever else I am saying and doing often has no bearing on this inner, verbal life.

The key word for my book The Woman in Black is unsettling... because you're not terrified all of the time or even frightened, but you're unsettled and once you're unsettled, then the door's open.

The more contemplative gardener, seeing the garden as a whole, the design of it, and its nature as a still place of delight and refreshment, will wait and hope for the moment when it seems to achieve perfection. Awareness of when such moments are most likely helps to make them happen; they will not be entirely accidental but anticipated; everything will be planned to encourage them.

There is a continuity about the garden and an order of succession in the garden year which is deeply pleasing, and in one sense there are no breaks or divisions - seed time flows on to flowering time and harvest time; no sooner is one thing dying than another is coming to life.

This gardener will be out in the very early morning and from late afternoon, attentive to small changes in the quality of light and the atmosphere, as well as to every nuance of the season, which combine to create perfection.

Whatever was about, whoever I had seen, and heard rocking, and who had passed me by just now, whoever had opened the locked door was not 'real'. No. But what was 'real'? At that moment I began to doubt my own reality.

But, in Moon Cottage, they are still asleep. I let myself in quietly and make a pot of tea, and take it outside, to sit under the apple tree and feel pleased. In the Buttercup field, one of the newest calves born a couple of nights ago, feeds and nuzzles and then wanders a yard or two away from its mother. It is white as milk, huge-eyed. The wrens are flying in and out of the woodshed and the bluetits in and out of a hole in the wall, by some guttering. Over the fields and farms and rooftops of Barley, the sun climbs and climbs. The dew has almost dried. The best of the day is done.

By the next war, the message will have got through. There will never be another war. There will always be wars. Men couldn't be so stupid, John! After all this? Isn't the only real purpose of our being here to teach them that lesson - how bloody useless and pointless the whole thing is? Men are naturally stupid and they do not learn from experience.

Fast reading of a great novel will get us the plot. It will get us names, a shadowy idea of characters, a sketch of settings. It will not get us subtleties, small differentiations, depth of emotion and observation, multilayered human experience, the appreciation of simile and metaphor, any sense of context, any comparison with other novels, other writers. Fast reading will not get us cadence and complexities of style and language. It will not get us anything that enters not just the conscious mind but the unconscious. It will not allow the book to burrow down into our memory and become part of ourselves, the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom and vicarious experience which helps to form us as complete human beings. It will not develop our awareness or add to the sum of our knowledge and intelligence. Read parts of a newspaper quickly or an encyclopaedia entry, or a fast-food thriller, but do not insult yourself or a book which has been created with its author's painstakingly acquired skill and effort, by seeing how fast you can dispose of it.

Here, in the garden at night, it is another world, strange and yet friendly and familiar, never frightening. There is such quietness, such sweetness, such refreshment. Close your eyes. Breathe in again, smell everything mingled together, flowers and earth and leaves and grass. Smell the night. Listen. Nothing at all. Silence, rushing like the sea in your ears. However small and sparse the garden, and wherever it is, even inside a great city, if something grows there, it is a magic place by night. Leave it, walk quietly back towards the lights that shine out of the house. You will take its magic with you. Now, you will sleep.

I felt dead and sick inside.

I go downstairs and the books blink at me from the shelves. Or stare. In a trick of the light, a row of them seems to shift very slightly, like a curtain blown by the breeze through an open window. Red is next to blue is next to cream is adjacent to beige. But when I look again, cream is next to green is next to black. A tall book shelters a small book, a huge Folio bullies a cowering line of Quartos. A child's nursery rhyme book does not have the language in which to speak to a Latin dictionary. Chaucer does not know the words in which Henry James communicates but here they are forced to live together, forever speechless.

I had changed, and gone on changing, but I did not fully remember how it had begun, or understand why.

I have always believed that places with a long history, especially those in which terrible events have taken place, retain something of those times, some trace in the air.

In early October, the woods begin to come alive again, and that surprises many people, who think of them in autumn as places of decay and dying, falling leaves and animals hiding away for their long winter hibernation. But it is summer there that is the dead time, in summer the air hangs heavy and close and still, nothing flowers, nothing sings, nothing stirs, and no light penetrates. But, now, there is a stirring, a sense of excitement.

It is okay to climb as long as you are not afraid, because being afraid is what made you fall

I tried to imagine her as the mother of a child, but simply could not. I felt sorry for any offspring she might produce.

It was on the second Tuesday in January - WI night - that winter became a serious and dramatic matter, a cold, tiring, but exhilarating time, at least for the young, and a companionable time for all, when we were stranded, snowbound and sealed off in place and, it seemed, in time too, for the usual pattern of the day’s coming and going was halted. We had been in the town all day, and I had scarcely noticed the weather. But, by the time I put the car up the last, steep bit of hill, past Cuckoo Farm and Foxley Spinney, towards the village, the sky had gathered like a boil, and had an odd, sulphurous yellow gleam over iron grey. It was achingly cold, the wind coming north-east off the Fen made us cry. We ran down the steps and indoors, switched on the lamps and opened up the stove, made tea, shut out the weather, though we could still hear it; the wind made a thin, steely noise under doors and through all the cracks and crevices of the old house. But by six o’clock there had been one of those sudden changes. I opened the door to let in Hastings, the tabby cat, and sensed it at once. The wind dropped and died, everything was still and dark as coal, no moonlight, not a star showed through the cloud cover, and it was just a degree wamer. I could smell the approching snow. Everything waited.

I walked up the stairs and hesitated at the open door.

I was frightened of myself, I seemed to have no control over my thoughts and feelings, it was like a sort of madness...

Places are often filled with their own pasts and exude a sense of them, an atmosphere of great good or great evil, which can be picked up by anyone sensitive to their surroundings.

Small children will talk to anyone, once the guard of shyness has fallen, and they have, like the elderly, a sense of immediacy, a need to say or do something, now, now, the minute it is thought of, combined with that other sense, of the complete irrelevance of time.

That Easter Monday evening, Mrs Miggs, in her ninety-sixth year, rolled up her crochet, and took in her chair, at the end of the afternoon, and closed her door and went to bed, early, as she always did, in the room that used to be the parlour, for she had not been able to climb the stairs since breaking her hip five years before, and in the night, in her sleep, died. And so there was a funeral service at the church to follow the farrier’s wedding, and people in Barley felt saddened, for Mrs Miggs was so well-known and liked, such a familiar figure, she had seemed immortal, and another link with the old days, the old village life, was severed. Sad too, we said, that she did not reach her hundredth year, to which she was looking forward. There would have been a party for her and the children would have made posies and taken them, and sung to her outside her window in the early morning. But a good funeral service, at the peaceful end of a long life, is not altogether an occasion for mourning. This one felt fitting, and things were in their proper order.

The lamps were lit, and a good fire crackled in the great stone fireplace. There was a discreet chink of china, the brightness of silver teapot and muffin cover, the comforting smell mingled of steaming hot water, toast and a little sweet tobacco.

We are not punished for our sins, we are punished by them. We can't live with guilt for the whole of our lives..

We have a friend, and Anglophile American city-dweller in his eighties, whose main ambition, now, is to hear a cuckoo call, for he never has, and perhaps he never will, for he is rather deaf. But, if he came and sat under the magic apple tree for an afternoon in May, it would be quiet enough, and then he might listen to the cuckoo-cuckoo-cuckoo until he had his fill.

We make our own destiny.

Your world may think what it chooses...but really, opinion and gossip count for nothing at all against truth...