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Susanna Clarke Quotes

Susanna Mary Clarke is an English author best known for her debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell , a Hugo Award-winning alternative history. Clarke began Jonathan Strange in 1993 and worked on it during her spare time. For the next decade, she published short stories from the Strange universe, but it was not until 2003 that Bloomsbury bought her manuscript and began work on its publication. The novel became a best-seller.

Two years later, she published a collection of her short stories, The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories . Both Clarke's novel and her short stories are set in a magical England and written in a pastiche of the styles of 19th-century writers such as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. While Strange focuses on the relationship of two men, Jonathan Strange and Gilbert Norrell, the stories in Ladies focus on the power women gain through magic. Wikipedia  

✵ 1. November 1959  •  Other names سوسانا كلارك
Susanna Clarke photo

Works

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories
Susanna Clarke: 29 quotes1 like

Famous Susanna Clarke Quotes

“To sit and pass hour after hour in idle chatter with a roomful of strangers is to me the worst sort of torment.”

Susanna Clarke book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Variant: I have a scholar's love of silence and solitude. To sit and pass hour after hour in idle chatter with a roomful of strangers is to me the worst sort of torment.
Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“He gave her his heart. She took it and placed it quietly in the pocket of her gown. No one observed what she did.”

Susanna Clarke book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“You mean to say he became mad deliberately?'
… Nothing is more likely,' said the duke.”

Susanna Clarke book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“Mr. Robinson was a polished sort of person. He was so clean and healthy and pleased about everything that he positively shone - which is only to be expected in a fairy or an angel, but is somewhat disconcerting in an attorney.”

Susanna Clarke book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands.”

Susanna Clarke book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Susanna Clarke Quotes about people

“Well, I suppose one ought not to employ a magician and then complain that he does not behave like other people.”

Susanna Clarke book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“She even learnt the language of a strange country which Senior Cosetti had been told some people believed still existed, although no-one in the world could say where it was. The name of this country was Wales.”

Susanna Clarke book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“It is these black clothes," said Strange. "I am like a leftover piece of funeral, condemned to walk about the Town, frightening people into thinking of their own mortality.”

Susanna Clarke book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Source: Jonathan Strange y el señor Norrell

Susanna Clarke Quotes

“I have been quite put out of temper this morning and someone ought to die for it.”

Susanna Clarke book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“And how shall I think of you?' He considered a moment and then laughed. 'Think of me with my nose in a book!”

Susanna Clarke book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“Can a magician kill a man by magic?” Lord Wellington asked Strange.
Strange frowned. He seemed to dislike the question. “I suppose a magician might,” he admitted, “but a gentleman never could.”

Susanna Clarke book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“Time and I have quarrelled. All hours are midnight now. I had a clock and a watch, but I destroyed them both. I could not bear the way they mocked me.”

Susanna Clarke book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“She wore a gown the color of storms, shadows, and rain and a necklace of broken promises and regrets.”

Susanna Clarke book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“There is nothing in the world so easy to explain as failure - it is, after all, what everybody does all the time.”

Susanna Clarke book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“.. The argument he was conducting with his neighbor as to whether the English magician had gone mad because he was a magician, or because he was English.”

Susanna Clarke book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“Oh! And they read English novels! David! Did you ever look into an English novel? Well, do not trouble yourself. It is nothing but a lot of nonsense about girls with fanciful names getting married.”

Susanna Clarke book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“For, though the room was silent, the silence of half a hundred cats is a peculiar thing, like fifty individual silences all piled one on top of another.”

Susanna Clarke book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“Magic, madam, is like wine and, if you are not used to it, it will make you drunk.”

Susanna Clarke book The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories

Source: The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories

“It [Ashfair House] was an old fashioned house—the sort of house in fact, as Strange expressed it, which a lady in a novel might like to be persecuted in.”

Susanna Clarke book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“Woods were ringed with a colour so soft, so subtle that it could scarcely be said to be a colour at all. It was more theof a colour - as if the trees were dreaming green dreams or thinking green thoughts.”

Susanna Clarke book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“What nobility of feeling! To sacrifice your own pleasure to preserve the comfort of others! It is a thing, I confess, that would never occur to me.”

Susanna Clarke book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“It is also true that his hair had a reddish tinge and, as everybody knows, no one with red hair can ever truly be said to be handsome.”

Susanna Clarke book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“The governess was not much liked in the village. She was too tall, too fond of books, too grave, and, a curious thing, never smiled unless there was something to smile at.”

Susanna Clarke book The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories

Source: The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories

“It is curious and we magicians collect curiosities, you know.”

Susanna Clarke book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“The land is all too shallow
It is painted on the sky
And trembles like the wind-shook rain
When the Raven King passed by”

Susanna Clarke

Source: Jonathan Strange i pan Norrell. Tom 3

“I know magicians and I know magic and I say this: all magicians lie and this one more than most.”

Susanna Clarke book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“Ha!' said the tall man drily. 'He was in high luck. Rich old uncles who die are in shockingly short supply.”

Susanna Clarke book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

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