“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
Quotes from bookJonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is the debut novel by British writer Susanna Clarke. Published in 2004, it is an alternative history set in 19th-century England around the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Its premise is that magic once existed in England and has returned with two men: Gilbert Norrell and Jonathan Strange. Centred on the relationship between these two men, the novel investigates the nature of "Englishness" and the boundaries between reason and unreason, Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Dane, and Northern and Southern English cultural tropes/stereotypes. It has been described as a fantasy novel, an alternative history, and a historical novel. It inverts the Industrial Revolution conception of the North-South divide in England: in this book the North is romantic and magical, rather than rational and concrete.
“To be more precise it was the color of heartache.”
Susanna Clarke book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
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
“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
“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
“It is curious and we magicians collect curiosities, you know.”
Susanna Clarke book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
