{"author":"Susan Hill","author_id":"Susan+Hill","total_quotes":18,"quotes":[{"text":"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.","author":"Susan Hill","tags":["books","reading","slow-reading"],"id":22000,"author_id":"Susan+Hill"},{"text":"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.","author":"Susan Hill","tags":["children","elderly","time"],"id":73393,"author_id":"Susan+Hill"},{"text":"We make our own destiny.","author":"Susan Hill","tags":["destiny"],"id":104761,"author_id":"Susan+Hill"},{"text":"They told of dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight, of locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tapping at casements, of howlings and shriekings, groanings and scuttlings and the clanking of chains, of hooded monks and headless horseman, swirling mists and sudden winds, insubstantial specters and sheeted creatures, vampires and bloodhounds, bats and rats and spiders, of men found at dawn and women turned white-haired and raving lunatic, and of vanished corpses and curses upon heirs.","author":"Susan Hill","tags":["castles","ghosts","gothic","graveyards","horror","ruins","vampires"],"id":140246,"author_id":"Susan+Hill"},{"text":"We are not punished for our sins, we are punished by them. We can't live with guilt for the whole of our lives..","author":"Susan Hill","tags":["guilt","sins"],"id":178876,"author_id":"Susan+Hill"},{"text":"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.","author":"Susan Hill","tags":["music","poetry","words"],"id":212446,"author_id":"Susan+Hill"},{"text":"I walked up the stairs and hesitated at the open door.","author":"Susan Hill","tags":["boundaries","ghost-story","supernatural","thresholds"],"id":212619,"author_id":"Susan+Hill"},{"text":"I felt dead and sick inside.","author":"Susan Hill","tags":["dead","sick"],"id":251476,"author_id":"Susan+Hill"},{"text":"I had changed, and gone on changing, but I did not fully remember how it had begun, or understand why.","author":"Susan Hill","tags":["change"],"id":321604,"author_id":"Susan+Hill"},{"text":"It's easy to write a short story and frighten people for five pages, but to work at length, when you do it as in 'The Turn Of The Screw' or 'A Christmas Carol,' it's different; you have to build it and build it.","author":"Susan Hill","tags":["work","short","people "],"id":328540,"author_id":"Susan+Hill"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":18,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}