Susanna Clarke Quotes

35 Sourced Quotes

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

Susanna Clarke
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.

Susanna Clarke
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.

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

Susanna Clarke
I know magicians and I know magic and I say this: all magicians lie and this one more than most.

Susanna Clarke
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
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.

Susanna Clarke
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.

Susanna Clarke
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
Can a magician kill a man by magic? Lord Wellington asked Strange. Strange frowned. He seemed to dislike the question. I suppose a magician might, he admitted, but a gentleman never would.

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

Susanna Clarke
Such nonsense!" declared Dr Greysteel. "Whoever heard of cats doing anything useful!" "Except for staring at one in a supercilious manner," said Strange. "That has a sort of moral usefulness, I suppose, in making one feel uncomfortable and encouraging sober reflection upon one's imperfections.

Susanna Clarke
He gave her his heart. She took it and placed it quietly in the pocket of her gown. No one observed what she did.

Susanna Clarke
An explorer cannot stay at home reading maps other men have made.

Susanna Clarke
Drawing teaches habits of close observation that will always be useful.

Susanna Clarke
I was told once by some country people that a magician should never tell his dreams because the telling will make them come true. But I say that is great nonsense.

Susanna Clarke
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
Mr. Robinson was a polished sort of person. He was so clean and healthy and pleased about everything that he positively shone - which is only to be expected in a fairy or an angel, but is somewhat disconcerting in an attorney.

Susanna Clarke
It is also true that his hair had a reddish tinge and, as everybody knows, no one with red hair can ever truly be said to be handsome.

Susanna Clarke
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
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.

Susanna Clarke
Ha!' said the tall man drily. 'He was in high luck. Rich old uncles who die are in shockingly short supply.

Susanna Clarke
I mean that two of any thing is a most uncomfortable number. One may do as he pleases. Six may get along well enough. But two must always struggle for mastery. Two must always watch each other. The eyes of all the world will be on two, uncertain which of them to follow.

Susanna Clarke
It is curious and we magicians collect curiosities, you know.

Susanna Clarke
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
Well, I suppose one ought not to employ a magician and then complain that he does not behave like other people.

Susanna Clarke
How is a magician to exist without books? Let someone explain that to me. It is like asking a politician to achieve high office without the benefit of bribes or patronage.

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

Susanna Clarke