“Byron tilted his head to a very odd angle, half-closed his eyes and composed his features to suggest that he was about to expire from chronic indigestion.”

“A lovely young Italian girl passed by. Byron tilted his head to a very odd angle, half-closed his eyes and composed his features to suggest that he was about to expire from chronic indigestion. Dr Greysteel could only suppose that he was treating the young woman to the Byronic profile and the Byronic expression.”

“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.”

“Mr. Norrell gazed at Strange with an odd expression upon his face as though he would have been glad of a little conversation with him, but had not the least idea how to begin.”

“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.”

“In his madness and his blindness he was Lear and Gloucester combined.”

“He was one of those people whose ideas are too lively to be confinedin their brains and spill out into the world to the consternation ofpassers-by. He talked to himself and the expression on his facechanged constantly. Within the space of a single moment he lookedsurprized, insulted, resolute, and angry--emotions which werepresumably the consequences of the energetic conversation he washolding with the ideal people inside his head.”