Susanna Clarke citations

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“To be more precise it was the color of heartache.”

“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.”

“.. 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“A piece of writing is like a piece of magic. You create something out of nothing.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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”

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

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

“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.”