Susanna Clarke

“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.”

“I only wish he had not married," said Mr. Norell fretfully. "Magicians have no business marrying.”

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

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

“But, though French, she was also very brave...”

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

“Alexander of Whitby taught that the universe is like a tapestry only parts of which are visible to us at a time. After we are dead, we will see the whole and then it will be clear to us how the different parts relate to each other.”

“He thought he stood upon an English hillside. Rain was falling; it twisted in the air like grey ghosts. Rain fell upon him and he grew thin as rain. Rainwashed away thought, washed away memory, all the good and the bad. He no longer knew his name. Everything was washed away like mud from a stone. Rain filled him up with thoughts and memories of its own. Silver lines of water covered the hillside, like intricate lace, like the veins of an arm. Forgetting that he was, or ever had been, a man, he became the lines of water. He fell into the earth with the rain.He thought he lay beneath the earth, beneath England. Long ages passed; cold and rain seeped through him; stones shifted within him. In the Silence and the Dark he grew vast.He became the earth; he became England. A star looked down on him and spoke tohim.A stone asked him a question and he answered it in its own language. A rivercurled at his side; hills budded beneath his fingers. He opened his mouth and breathed out spring.He thought he was pressed into a thicket in a dark wood in winter. The trees went on forOver dark pillars separated by thin, white slices of winter light. He lookeddown. Young saplings pierced him through and through; they grew up through his body, through his feet and hands. His eye-lids would no longer close because twigs had grown up through them.”

“It has been remarked (by a lady infinitely cleverer than the present author) how kindly disposed the world in general feels to young people who either die or marry. Imagine then the interest that surrounded Miss Wintertowne! No young lady ever had such advantages before: for she died upon the Tuesday, was raised to life in the early hours of Wednesday morning, and was married upon the Thursday; which some people thought too much excitement for one week.”

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

“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.”

“Perhaps I am too tame, too domestic a magician. But how does one work up a little madness? I meet with mad people every day in the street, but I never thought before to wonder how they got mad. Perhaps I should go wandering on lonely moors and barren shores. That is always a popular place for lunatics - in novels and plays at any rate. Perhaps wild England will make me mad.”

“But that is not to say that there might not be someone in the world - I do not say I have seen him yet - whom I would be a little afraid to look at sometimes - for fear that he might be looking sad - or lost - or thoughtful, or - what, you know, might seem the worst of all - brooding on some private anger or hurt and so not knowing or caring if I looked at him at all.”

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

“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.”

“He did not feel as if he were inside a Pillar of Darkness in the middle of Yorkshire; he felt more as if the rest of the world had fallen away and he and Strange were left alone upon a solitary island or promontory. The idea distressed him a great deal less than one might have supposed. He had never much cared for the world and he bore its loss philosophically.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“And now, Your Majesty," said Strange, "I think it is time we returned to the Castle. You and I, Your Majesty, are a British King and a British magician. Though Great Britain may desert us, we have no right to desert Great Britain. She may have need of us yet.”

“Lovers are rarely the most rational beings in creation...”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“But when the fairy sang the whole world listened to him. Stephen felt clouds pause in their passing; he felt sleeping hills shift and murmur; he felt cold mists dance. 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. In the fairy’s song the earth recognized the names by which it called itself.”

“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.”

“Some time later there was a knock at his door. He was surprised to find it was now evening and the room was quite dark. The knock sounded again. The landlord was at the door. The landlord began to talk, but Strange could not understand him. This was because the man had a pineapple in his mouth. How he had managed to cram the whole thing in there, Strange could not imagine. Green, spiky leaves emerged slowly out of his mouth and then were sucked back in again as he spoke. Strange wondered if perhaps he ought to go and fetch a knife or a hook and try and fish the pineapple out, in case the landlord should choke. But at the same time he did not care much about it. 'After all,' he thought with some irritation, 'it is his own fault. He put it there.”

“There is nothing else in magic but the wild thought of the bird as it casts itself into the void. There is no creature upon the earth with such potential for magic. Even the least of them may fly straight out of this world and come by chance to the Other Lands. Where does the wind come from that blows upon your face, that fans the pages of your book? Where the harum-scarum magic of small wild creatures meets the magic of Man, where the language of the wind and the rain and the trees can be understood, there we will find the Raven King.”

“you must learn to live as I do - in the face of constant criticism, opposition and censure. That, sir, is the English way.”

“He smiles but rarely and watches other men to see when they laugh and then does the same.”

“...He danced with a young woman with no hair, but who wore a wig of shining beetles that swarmed and seethed on her head. His third partner complained bitterly whenever Stephen's hand happened to brush her gown; she said it put her gown of its singing; and, when Stephen looked down, he saw that her gown was indeed covered with tiny mouths which opened and sang a little tune in a series of high, errie notes.”

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

“And what do you keep in such a pretty little box, sir? Snuff?'Oh, no! It is a great treasure of mine that I wish Lady Pole to wear tonight!' He opened the box and showed Stephen a small, white finger.”

“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.”

“But now there were ten bells. And the bell for Lost-Hope was ringing violently.”

“Which demomstrates the sad poverty of English launguage...”

“I am rather of the opinion that in England a gentleman's dreams are his own private concern. I fancy there is a law in that effect and, if there is not, why, Parliament should certainly be made to pass one immediately! It ill becomes another man to invite himself into them.”

“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.”

“Lascelles threw himself into the carriage, snorting with laughter and saying that he had never in his life heard of anything so ridiculous and comparing their snug drive through the London streets in Mr. Norrell's carriage to ancient French and Italian fables where fools set sail in milk-pails to fetch the moon's reflection from the bottom of a duckpond...”

“Ah, but sir,' said Lascelles, 'it is precisely by passing judgments upon other people's work and pointing out their errors that readers can be made to understand your own opinions better. It is the easiest thing in the world to turn a review to one's own ends. One only need mention the book once or twice and for the rest of the article one may develop one's theme just as one chuses. It is, I assure you, what every body else does.”

“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).”

“Well, Henry, you can cease frowning at me. If I am a magician, I am a very indifferent one. Other adepts summon up fairy-spirits and long-dead kings. I appear to have conjured the spirit of a banker.”

“The land is all too shallowIt is painted on the skyAnd trembles like the wind-shook rainWhen the Raven King passed by”

“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.”

“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!”

“After two hours it stopped raining and in the same moment the spell broke, which Peroquet and the Admiral and Captain Jumeau knew by a curious twist of their senses, as if they had tasted a string quartet, or been, for a moment, deafened by the sight of colour blue.”

“As a sad, grey dawn broke over the hillside he came upon a ruined cottage [named Broken-Heart Farm] which did not so much seem to have broken its heart, as its neck.”

“It was difficult to image quite where this gentleman [a statue] could have come from: he was a little too cheerful for a saint in a church and not quite comical enough for a coffee-house sign.”

“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.”

“Unfortunately, Childermass's French was so strongly accented by his native Yorkshire that Minervois did not understand and asked Strange if Childermass was Dutch. ”