Top 100 Susanna Clarke Quotes
#1. I read Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I think will subsequently be recognized as one of the first great novels of the 21st century.
Lev Grossman
#2. 'Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell' by Susanna Clarke is a big, thick book. About a thousand pages in paperback. I've heard several people say the size alone intimidated them.
Ann Leckie
#3. John Longridge, the cook at Harley-street, had suffered from low spirits for more than thirty years, and he was quick to welcome Stephen as a newcomer to the freemasonry of melancholy.
Susanna Clarke
#4. The next day Mrs Honeyfoot told her husband that John Segundus was exactly what a gentleman should be, but she feared he would never profit by it for it was not the fashion to be modest and quiet and kind-hearted.
Susanna Clarke
#5. In his madness and his blindness he was Lear and Gloucester combined.
Susanna Clarke
#6. Bright yellow leaves flowed swiftly upon the dark, almost-black water, making patterns as they went. To Mr. Segundus the patterns looked a little like magical writing. 'But then,' he thought, 'So many things do.
Susanna Clarke
#7. With characteristic exuberance Tom named this curiously constructed
house Castel des Tours saunz Nowmbre, which means the Castle of
Innumerable Towers. David Montefiore had counted the innumerable
towers in 1764. There were fourteen of them.
Susanna Clarke
#8. Drawing teaches habits of close observation that will always be useful.
Susanna Clarke
#9. And all the nursemaids and kitchen maids I ever knew when I was a child, always had a aunt, who knew a woman, whose first cousin's boy had been put into just such a box, and had never been seen again.
Susanna Clarke
#10. I always really liked magicians. I'm not even sure why - except that they know things other people don't, and they live in untidy rooms full of strange objects.
Susanna Clarke
#11. Which demomstrates the sad poverty of English launguage ...
Susanna Clarke
#12. 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.
Susanna Clarke
#13. How quickly was every bad thing discovered to be the fault of the previous administration (an evil set of men who wedded general stupidity to wickedness of purpose).
Susanna Clarke
#14. It is curious and we magicians collect curiosities, you know.
Susanna Clarke
#15. Lord Byron ! Of course!" cried Dr Greysteel. "I forgot all about him! I must go and warn him to be discreet." "I think it's a little late for that, sir," said Frank.
Susanna Clarke
#16. [A] smile is the most becoming
ornament that any lady can wear.
Susanna Clarke
#17. I have been quite put out of temper this morning and someone ought to die for it.
Susanna Clarke
#19. With his long hair as ragged as rain and as black as thunder, he would have looked quite at home upon a windswept moor, or lurking in some pitch-black alleyway, or perhaps in a novel by Mrs. Radcliffe.
Susanna Clarke
#20. It would need someone very remarkable to recover your name, Stephen, someone of rare perspicacity, with extraordinary talents and incomparable nobility of character. Me, in fact.
Susanna Clarke
#21. A Nottinghamshire man called Tubbs wished very much to see a fairy and, from thinking of fairies day and night, and from reading all sorts of odd books about them, he took it into his head that his coachman was a fairy.
Susanna Clarke
#22. A tragi-comedy, telling of an impoverished minister's desperate attempts to gain money by any means, beginning with a mercenary marriage and ending with sorcery. I should think it might be received very well. I believe I shall call it, ' Tis Pity She's a Corpse.
Susanna Clarke
#23. 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
#24. Alan Moore is a peculiarly unsung triumph of British culture, and Northampton, where he was born in 1953, the son of brewery worker Ernest and printer Sylvia, is where you must go to find him.
Susanna Clarke
#25. Unfortunately, Childermass's French was so strongly accented by his native Yorkshire that Minervois did not understand and asked Strange if Childermass was Dutch.
Susanna Clarke
#26. A patrol had been sent out to look at the road between two towns, but some Portuguese had come along and told the patrol that this was one of the English magician's roads and was certain to disappear in an hour or two taking everyone upon it to Hell - or possibly England.
Susanna Clarke
#27. Arabella, like a sweet, compliant woman and good wife, put all thoughts of her new curtains aside for the moment and assured both gentlemen that in such a cause it was no trouble to her to wait.
Susanna Clarke
#28. But a soldier ought not to dwell too long on such matters. His life is full of hardship and he must take his pleasure where he can. Though he may take time to reflect upon the cruelties that he sees, place him among his comrades and it is almost impossible for his spirits not to rise. Strange
Susanna Clarke
#29. To Strange's unnautical eye, it looked very much as if the ship had simply lain down and gone to sleep. He felt that if he had been the Captain he would have spoken to her sternly and made her get up again.
Susanna Clarke
#30. ...in the old days, silvery bells would often sound just as some Englishman or Englishwoman of particular virtue or beauty was about to be stolen away by fairies to live in strange, ghostly lands for ever.
Susanna Clarke
#31. I only wish he had not married," said Mr. Norell fretfully. "Magicians have no business marrying.
Susanna Clarke
#32. One of them is married and another is engaged and the third cannot make up her mind.
Susanna Clarke
#33. In familiar surroundings our manners are cheerful and easy, but only transport us to places where we know no one and no one knows us, and Lord! how uncomfortable we become!
Susanna Clarke
#34. He knew that there was a world of difference between these two notions: one was sane and the other was not, but he could not for the life of him remember which was which.
Susanna Clarke
#35. 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
#36. There is a book waiting for him upon the library table; his eyes fancy they still follow its lines of type, his head still runs upon its argument, his fingers itch to take it up again.
Susanna Clarke
#37. But these people were judged very stupid by their friends. Was not Jonathan Strange known to be precisely the sort of whimsical, contradictory person who would publish against himself?
Susanna Clarke
#38. Being a politician, he was never dissuaded from giving any body his opinion by the mere fact that they were not inclined to hear it.
Susanna Clarke
#39. Beautiful flames, can destroy so many things - prison walls that hold you, stitches that bind you fast.
Susanna Clarke
#40. In some ways, 'Mansfield Park' is 'Pride and Prejudice' turned inside out.
Susanna Clarke
#41. Strange stared thoughtfully at her for several seconds, so that Arabella mistakenly supposed he must be considering what she had just said. But when he spoke it was only to say in a tone of gentle reproof, "My love, you are standing on my papers." He took her arm and moved her gently aside.
Susanna Clarke
#42. Lovers are rarely the most rational beings in creation ...
Susanna Clarke
#43. Mr. Honeyfoot's post-chaise travelled through a world that seemed to contain a much higher proportion of chill grey sky and a much smaller one of solid comfortable earth than was usually the case.
Susanna Clarke
#44. Nothing, I find, has prepared me for the sight of my own characters walking about. A playwright or screenwriter must expect it; a novelist doesn't and naturally concludes that she has gone mad.
Susanna Clarke
#45. Several people seized Strange bodily. One man started shaking him vigorously, as though he thought that he might in this way dispel any magic before it took effect.
Susanna Clarke
#46. After all," he thought, "what can a magician do against a lead ball? Between the pistol firing and his heart exploding, there is no time for magic.
Susanna Clarke
#47. But the other Ministers considered that to employ a magician was one thing, novelists were quite another and they would not stoop to it.
Susanna Clarke
#48. Many people nowadays have surnames that reveal their ancestors' fairy origins. Otherlander and Fairchild are two.
Susanna Clarke
#49. There are some things which have no business being put into books for all the world to read.
Susanna Clarke
#50. There must come a time when the bullets will run out
Susanna Clarke
#51. It is the contention of Mr Norrell of Hanover-square that everything belonging to John Uskglass must be shaken out of modern magic, as one would shake moths and dust out of an old coat. What does he imagine he will have left? If you get rid of John Uskglass you will be left holding the empty air.
Susanna Clarke
#52. It is, after all, many centuries since clergymen distinguished themselves on the field of war, and lawyers never have.
Susanna Clarke
#53. I had always been fascinated by comics, but it had taken me several weeks to make up my mind to buy 'Watchmen'; for someone on a publisher's assistant's salary, it was some quite unheard-of sum of money.
Susanna Clarke
#54. She wore a gown the color of storms, shadows, and rain and a necklace of broken promises and regrets.
Susanna Clarke
#57. I had to restrain myself from buying a book on 19th-century fruit knives.
Susanna Clarke
#58. He had the odd idea that, though only a whisper, it could have passed through stone or iron or brass. It could have spoken to you from a thousand feet beneath the earth and you would have still heard it. It could have shattered precious stones and brought on madness.
Susanna Clarke
#59. The Emperor Napoleon Buonaparte had been banished to the island of Elba. However His Imperial Majesty had some doubts wheter a quiet island life would suit him - he was, after all, accustomed to governing a large proportion of the known world.
Susanna Clarke
#60. Yet within Mr Norrell's dry little heart there was as lively an ambition to bring back magic to England as would satisfied even Mr Honeyfoot, and it was with the intention of bring that ambition to a long-postponed fulfilment that Mr Norrell now proposed to go to London.
Susanna Clarke
#61. I have no cause to love Mr. Norrell- far from it. But I know this about him: he is a magician first and everything else second- and Jonathan is the same. Books and magic are all either of them really care about.
Susanna Clarke
#62. Of all the tiresome situations in the world, thought the Prince Regent, the most tiresome was to rise from one's bed in a state of uncertainty as to whether or not one was the ruler of Great Britain.
Susanna Clarke
#63. You mean to say he became mad deliberately?' ... Nothing is more likely,' said the duke.
Susanna Clarke
#64. A piece of writing is like a piece of magic. You create something out of nothing.
Susanna Clarke
#65. It sometimes happens that when one acts quickly and with great resolve, all the indecisiveness and doubt comes afterwards, when it is too late. So
Susanna Clarke
#66. She spoke Basque, which is a language which rarely makes any impression upon the brains of any other race, so that a man may hear it as often and as long as he likes, but never afterwards be able to recall a single syllable of it.
Susanna Clarke
#67. This is the genius of my enemy! Lock a door against him and all that happens is that he learns first how to pick a lock and second how to build a better one against you!
Susanna Clarke
#68. ..(As to what they might be resting upon, Stephen was determined not to consider).
Susanna Clarke
#69. 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
#70. Mr. Honeyfoot did not propose going quite so far
indeed he did not wish to go far at all because it was winter and the roads where very shocking.
Susanna Clarke
#71. 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
#72. Poor gentleman," said Mr Segundus. "Perhaps it is the age. It is not an age for magic or scholarship, is it sir? Tradesmen prosper, sailors, politicians, but not magicians. Our time is past.
Susanna Clarke
#73. Sometimes you my graciously permit all the most beautiful ladies in the land to wait in line to kiss your hands and fall in love with you.
Susanna Clarke
#74. For this is England where a man's neighbours will never suffer him to live entirely bereft of society, let him be as dry and sour-faced as he may.
Susanna Clarke
#75. The old King is dead. The new King approaches! And at his approach the world sheds its sorrow. The sings of the old King dissolve like morning mist! The world assumes the character of the new. His virtues fill up the wood and world!
Susanna Clarke
#76. There is nothing in the world so easy to explain as failure - it is, after all, what everybody does all the time.
Susanna Clarke
#77. It might well appear to Sir Walter that there had been no quarrel. It was often the case that gentlemen did not observe the signs.
Susanna Clarke
#78. Mr. Segundus began to suspect that they had an uneventful morning, and that when a strange gentleman had walked into the room and dropt down in a swoon, they were rather pleased than otherwise.
Susanna Clarke
#79. Every man and woman present thought how the neatly drawn lines and words upon the maps were in truth ice-covered pools and rivers, silent woods, frozen ditches and high, bare hills and every one of them thought how many sheep and cattle and wild creatures died in this season.
Susanna Clarke
#80. It is impossible to say how many dinners Drawlight was invited to sit down to that day - and it is fortunate that he was never at any time much of an eater or he might have done some lasting damage to his digestion.
Susanna Clarke
#81. 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
#82. Byron!" exclaimed the little man. "Really? Dear me! Mad, and a friend of Lord Byron!" He sounded as if he did not know which was worse.
Susanna Clarke
#83. Could soldiers read? Mr Norrell did not know. He turned with a look of desperate appeal to Childermass.
Childermass shrugged.
Susanna Clarke
#84. The pigment must be mixed with the tears of spinsters of good family, who must live long lives of impeccable virtue and die without ever having had a day of true happiness.
Susanna Clarke
#85. Like many spells with unusual names, the Unrobed Ladies was a great deal less exciting than it sounded.
Susanna Clarke
#86. He muttered something of Mr. Norrell's honest countenance.
The York society did not think this very satisfactory (and had they actually been privileged to see Mr. Norrell's countenance they might have thought it even less so).
Susanna Clarke
#87. A gentleman in Mr Norell's position with a fine house and a large estate will always be of interest to his neighbors and, unless those neighbors are very stupid, they will always contrive to know a little of what he does.
Susanna Clarke
#88. Soldiers, I am sorry to say, steal everything." He thought for a moment and then added, "Or at least ours do." How
Susanna Clarke
#89. O, wherever men of my sort used to go, long ago. Wandering on paths that other men have not seen. Behind the sky. On the other side of the rain.
Susanna Clarke
#90. Ha!" cried Dr John contemptuously. "Magic! That is chiefly used for killing Frenchmen, is it not?
Susanna Clarke
#91. The trees, the stones and the earth had taken him inside themselves, but in their shape it was possible still to discern something of the man he had once been.
Susanna Clarke
#92. He wished he had never come to London. He wished he had never undertaken to revive English magic. He wished he had stayed at Hurtfew Abbey, reading and doing magic for his own pleasure. None of it, he thought, was worth the loss of forty books.
Susanna Clarke
#93. An explorer cannot stay at home reading maps other men have made.
Susanna Clarke
#94. Both had indulged in, if not Black Magic, then certainly magic of a darker hue than seemed desirable or legitimate.
Susanna Clarke
#95. I hope there may be bogs and that John McKenzie may drown in them.
Susanna Clarke
#96. All books are doors; and some of them are wardrobes.
Susanna Clarke
#97. Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians. They met upon the third Wednesday of every month and read each other long, dull papers upon the history of English magic.
Susanna Clarke
#98. He hardly ever spoke of magic, and when he did it was like a history lesson and no one could bear to listen to him.
Susanna Clarke
#99. I cannot recall an instance of anything very dreadful happening at half-past one
Susanna Clarke
#100. Books and papers are the basis of good scholarship and sound knowledge," declared Mr Norrell primly. "Magic is to be put on the same footing as the other disciplines.
Susanna Clarke
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