Setting Quotes

“The house smelled musty and damp, and a little sweet, as if it were haunted by the ghosts of long-dead cookies.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“When ideas evaporate, when shapes fade and forms lose their integrity, our imagination can create an outlandish setting and convert everything into a hazy, misty Turner landscape. ("Back garden of a dream")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Places are never just places in a piece of writing. If they are, the author has failed. Setting is not inert. It is activated by point of view.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“I watched the land for as long as I could, until it disappeared behind its shawl of mist, and until I had it fixed in my mind - unchanged, mysterious and beautiful”
― Aimee Friedman, Sea Change

“An author knows his landscape best; he can stand around, smell the wind, get a feel for his place.”
― Tony Hillerman

“The yard twinkled as though several hundred obliging fireflies had decided to attend the party.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“On the whole I try to keep Modesty and Willie in timeless settings, which is why I avoid all the latest slang and in-words. It won't be long before 'brill' sounds as dated as 'super' does now. [Uncle Happy, 1990]”
― Peter O'Donnell

“In the detective story, as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder. The country is preferable to the town, a well-to-do neighborhood (but not too well-to-do-or there will be a suspicion of ill-gotten gains) better than a slum. The corpse must shock not only because it is a corpse but also because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing room carpet."

(The guilty vicarage: Notes on the detective story, by an addict, Harper's Magazine, May 1948)”
― W.H. Auden

“A sea-green sky: lamps blossoming white. This is marginal land: fields of strung wire, of treadless tyres in ditches, fridges dead on their backs, and starving ponies cropping the mud. It is a landscape running with outcasts and escapees, with Afghans, Turks and Kurds: with scapegoats, scarred with bottle and burn marks, limping from the cities with broken ribs. The life forms here are rejects, or anomalies: the cats tipped from speeding cars, and the Heathrow sheep, their fleece clotted with the stench of aviation fuel.”
― Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black

“A brisk autumn breeze flowed past, bringing with it scents from the city below: bread and cinnamon and oranges; roast meats and salt. Nesta inhaled, identifying each one, wondering how they could all somehow combine to create a singular sense of autumn.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A ​Court of Silver Flames

“When I start writing a new story, I often begin with setting. Before plot, before dialogue, before anything else, I begin to see where a story will take place, and then I hear the narrative voice, which means that character is not far behind. Lately I've been thinking a lot about landscape painting and literature, and perhaps as an extension of this I have started to think through this idea of character and landscape as similar things, or at least as intimates, co-dependent.”
― Amina Cain, A Horse at Night: On Writing

“nothing seemed to belong definitely to anywhere; even the gates were not necessarily to be found on their hinges.”
― Saki

“It's really quite a beautiful setting for an estate, in a woods of towering aspen trees near a field of high soft blue grass where pink cows sleep.”
― Murray Pomerance, Magia d'Amore

“The lights of the city hovered in a nimbus and again stood fractured in the black river, isinglass image, tangled broken shapes splash of lights along the bridgewalk following the elliptic and receding rows of the pole lamps across to meet them. The rhythmic arc of the wipers on the glass lulled him and he coasted out onto the bridge, into the city shrouded in rain and silence, the cars passing him slowly, their headlamps wan, watery lights in sorrowful progression.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

“A police officer that is threatening you with arrest is setting you up for your arrest.”
― Steven Magee

“Through the archway, and up the hill, I feel it surging, and drop to my knees. A string of black smoke wafts out of my mouth, as a long slender form starts to crawl out of my gaping maw. My eyes water as it slides and pulls and slowly works its way out of me, trying not to bite down, struggling to breathe. And in the glow of the moon the serpent finally weaves its muscled form out of me, a diamond pattern running down its length, crisscrossed threads of silver, a flicker of its tongue, and an angry hiss permeating the night. As it slithers into the underbrush—ten feet, twenty feet, thirty feet long—the last of it to disappear are three razor sharp needles sticking out of its tail. (End of Chapter Two.)”
― Richard Thomas, Incarnate: A Novel

“We head down a road for utility vehicles, where beer bottles grow out of the weeds like squashes.”
― Junot Díaz, Drown

“My trip home took me north along 101st Street up to 104th Avenue where I cut through a large open lot where the old railway used to run toward my neighborhood. From there I headed west along 105th, behind Grant MacEwan College and its concrete towers, until I got to my house, which was located in a neighborhood officially called Central MacDougall.

However, over a series of years, it had been given a series of informal names based on the immigrants who lived there at the time. It had been called Little Saigon in the seventies and eighties because of the Southeast Asian boat people fleeing the Vietnam War and its aftermath. Those folks had moved, and in the past ten years or so they had been replaced by refugees fleeing African wars in Ethiopi, the Sudan, Somalia, and like. The new name was now Little Mogadishu or, more informally, Kush.”
― Wayne Arthurson

“My life had been frozen in time and now that I had permission to thaw, the world had changed.”
― DiAnn Mills, Trace of Doubt

“Testing with CPAP and APAP sleep apnea machines in June 2020 revealed I am intolerant to anything but the lowest pressure setting of 4 cmH2O.”
― Steven Magee

“You were there in a former life,” Doc theorized.
“I dream about it, Doc. I wake up so sure sometimes. Spike feels that way, too. Maybe it’s all this rain, but we’re starting to have the same dreams. We can’t find a way to return to Lemuria, so it’s returning to us. Rising up out of the ocean–’hi Leej, hi Spike, long time ain’t it. . . .’”
“It talked to you guys?”
“I don’t know. It isn’t just a place.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice

“I was at the precipice. I knew it. So, then the issue was simply finding out where this journey was to take place. I needed a setting my main character would thrive in, a place that had a quality all its own. That's when it occurred to me, to use a painting.”
― Kristina Smeriglio, Falling Into Fire

“Several tall trees edging the school grounds rustled in the wind — the old oaks nudging each other and the younger willows whispering little fanciful commentaries as they observed the two young people together.”
― H.C. Roberts, Harp and the Lyre: Exposed

“The office for Save All Living Things (SALT) is in a two-story building that was saved, but not nurtured.”
― Christina Estes, Off the Air

“A tiny heart floats in a yellowing liquid, somehow still beating. Next to it, a bowl filled with Yoyos, the strings dirty, crusted with brown stains, a meaty smell lifting off of the faded toys. In a large glass mason jar there is nothing but hair—long blonde strands, several puffs of dark, curly tightness, and brown clippings in a number of lengths, all mixed together. (The Caged Bird Sings in a Darkness of Its Own Creation)”
― Richard Thomas, Spontaneous Human Combustion

“There was a time in the beginning when I too questioned the plan—staring out over the deadlands, the wastelands, at the dry, desert landscape, the hellfires that burned over the horizon, the masses growing in number, filling in one valley after another. The way the earth cracked open, strange appendages and tentacles spooling out of the steaming cracks. The forests at the edge of the mountains spilling creatures on four legs, humping and galloping over the foliage, and into the high grasses as the growth turned into spoil. And up over the range lurked flying beasts with cracked, leathery wings—thick purple veins running through the expanding, unfurling flesh—elongated skulls holding back rows of sharp teeth, chittering in the settling gloam. Below the hills, pools of water, sometimes blue, but more likely a mossy green, a dark scum, filled with gelatinous blobs, covered with spiky hairs, a collection of yellowing eyes atop what might have been considered some kind of head. And snapping at my own heels, the furry creatures with mottled, diseased skin revealed in chunks, snouts exposed to show the fractured, bony skulls beneath it all, long, slavering tongues distending, lapping at the foul air around us. (In His House)”
― Richard Thomas, Spontaneous Human Combustion

“The non-industrial setting of so much fantasy... reminds us of what we have denied, what we have exiled ourselves from. Animals were once more to us than meat, pests, or pets: they were fellow-creatures, colleagues, dangerous equals... They remind us that the human is not the universal.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Cheek by Jowl: Talks and Essays on How and Why Fantasy Matters

“KNOW, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars—Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen- eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet."—The Nemedian Chronicles”
― Robert E Howard's

“Your hometown makes you and breaks you and makes you again.”
― Essie J. Chambers, Swift River

“The setting in a book is as much a character to me as the people who populate the story.”
― Joie Lesin