Quotes from Susanna Clarke

we ignore those foundations at our peril. They should be studied and their nature understood so that we can learn what they will support and what they will not.

está empeñado en guardarse para sí ciertas cosas, eso es evidente..., y supongo que no siempre puede acordarse de qué ha de permanecer en secreto y qué no.

Oh, quite!" agreed Byron. "I was with him again a few hours ago and could not get him to talk of any thing but his dead wife and how she is not really dead, but merely enchanted. And now he shrouds himself in Darkness and works Black Magic! There is something rather admirable in all this, do you not agree?

Shape-changing and so on were all very well in the past. It makes a vivid incident in a story, I grant you. But surely, Strange, you would not want to practise it? A gentleman cannot change his shape. A gentleman scorns to seem any thing other than what he is. You yourself would never wish to appear in the character of a pastry-cook or a lamplighter …

Other countries," he said, "have stories of kings who will return at times of great need. Only in England is it part of the constitution.

it seemed to him as if Mr Norrell had discovered some fifth point of the compass – not east, nor south, nor west, nor north, but somewhere quite different and this was the direction in which he led them.

She did not rise at their entrance, nor make any sign that she had noticed them at all. But perhaps she did not hear them. 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.

Strange a quite extraordinary number of books to read, and said that he expected him to have read them by the end of the week.

It is January and I am arriving at an English country house in Yorkshire. Fog and rain shroud the park. The interior is a dim labyrinth of splendid but desolate rooms, full of winter shadows and echoing footsteps.

I am surrounded by ancient friends and allies, Rogue, what do you have to counter that? Vinculus thrust out his dirty chin at the gentleman in a gesture of the utmost contempt. A book! he said.

The walls were hung with a series of gigantic paintings in gilded frames of great complexity, all depicting the city of Venice, but the day was overcast, a cold stormy rain had set in, and Venice – that city built of equal parts of sunlit marble and sunlit sea – was drowned in a London gloom.

A heap of shining guineas was lying there. Mrs Brandy picked up one of the coins and examined it. It was as though she held a ball of soft yellow light with a coin at the bottom of it.

There was a tall, sensible man in the room called Thorpe, a gentleman with very little magical learning, but a degree of common sense rare in a magician. He

He had a very young man's belief in the absolute rightness of his own cause and the absolute wrongness of everyone else's.

From the open window came the mingled odours of horse-sweat, peaches and sour milk.

is expected to have certain peculiarities, but the most peculiar feature of Mr Norrell's house was, without a doubt, Childermass. In no other household in London was there any servant like him. One day he might be observed removing a dirty cup and wiping crumbs from a table like a common footman. The next day

I am an anamnesiologist. I study what has been forgotten.

If I leave, then the House will have no Inhabitant and how will I bear the thought of it Empty?

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. Stephen

He walked around Mr Norrell slowly, considering him from every angle. Then, most disconcerting of all, he plucked Mr Norrell's wig from his head and looked underneath, as if Mr Norrell were a cooking pot on the fire and he wished to know what was for dinner.

Há quem prefira atribuir sua falta de êxito a uma falha do mundo em vez de ao conhecimento mediano que tenha.

Palavra de honra, não existe nada no mundo tão fácil de explicar como o fracasso... É, afinal de contas, o que todo mundo alcança o tempo inteiro.

O desânimo, Mister Black, é o pior tormento de que um homem pode sofrer.

But though he had no striking vices, his virtues were perhaps almost as hard to define.