Top 300 Susanna Clarke Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Susanna Clarke

2. “You’ve got to sing like you don’t need the money. You’ve got to love like you’ll never get hurt. You’ve got to dance like there’s nobody watching. You’ve got to come from the heart, if you want it to work.”

— Susanna Clarke

3. “Drawing teaches habits of close observation that will always be useful.”

— Susanna Clarke

4. “An explorer cannot stay at home reading maps other men have made.”

— Susanna Clarke

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

— Susanna Clarke

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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.”

— Susanna Clarke

9. “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.”

— Susanna Clarke

10. “To be more precise it was the color of heartache.”

— Susanna Clarke

11. “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

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

— Susanna Clarke

13. “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

14. “All books are doors; and some of them are wardrobes.”

— Susanna Clarke

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

— Susanna Clarke

16. “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.”

— Susanna Clarke

17. “The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.”

— Susanna Clarke

18. “Believe me when I tell you that ten, twenty, even fifty years of silence is worth the satisfaction of knowing at the end that you have said what you ought – no more, no less.”

— Susanna Clarke

19. “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

20. “There must come a time when the bullets will run out.”

— Susanna Clarke

21. “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

22. “Because, whenever I am melancholy you talk to me of cheerful things and cure my low spirits and so I must now do the same for you. That is what friendship is.”

— Susanna Clarke

23. “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

24. “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

25. “In 1819 the proudest man in all of England was, without a doubt, the Duke of Wellington. This was not particularly surprising ; when a man has twice defeated the armies of the wicked French Emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte, it is only natural that he should have a rather high opinion of himself .”

— Susanna Clarke

26. “In my mind are all the tides, their seasons, their ebbs and their flows.”

— Susanna Clarke

27. “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

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

— Susanna Clarke

29. “Now toasted cheese is a temptation few men can resist, be they charcoal burners or kings. John Uskglass reasoned thus: all of Cumbria belonged to him – therefore this wood belonged to him – therefore this toasted cheese belonged to him.”

— Susanna Clarke

30. “I hope you will write occasionally? Some token of your impressions?” “Oh! I shall not spare you. It is the right of a traveller to vent their frustration at every minor inconvenience by writing of it to their friends. Expect long descriptions of everything.”

— Susanna Clarke

31. “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

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

— Susanna Clarke

33. “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

34. “Mr Norrell assured Mr Strange that he would find war very disagreeable. “One is often wet and cold upon a battlefield. You will like it a great deal less than you suppose.”

— Susanna Clarke

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

— Susanna Clarke

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

— Susanna Clarke

37. “I realised that the search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted, and that if ever we discover the Knowledge, then it will be as if the Value has been wrested from the House and all that remains will be mere scenery.”

— Susanna Clarke

38. “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.”

— Susanna Clarke

39. “Not everything about the Wind was bad. Sometimes it blew through the little voids and crevices of the Statues and caused them to sing and whistle in surprising ways; I had never known the Statues to have voices before and it made me laugh for sheer delight.”

— Susanna Clarke

40. “Our clothes were plastered to our bodies with wet. My hair – which is dark and curly – was as full of droplets as a Cloud. I rained every time I moved.”

— Susanna Clarke

41. “The enormity of this task sometimes makes me feel a little dizzy, but as a scientist and an explorer I have a duty to bear witness to the Splendours of the World.”

— Susanna Clarke

42. “Excess of grief may bring on quite as fine a bout of madness an an excess of any thing else. Truth to tell, I was not quite myself for a time. Truth to tell, I was a little wild.”

— Susanna Clarke

43. “People call me a philosopher or a scientist or an anthropologist. I am none of those things. I am an anamnesiologist. I study what has been forgotten. I divine what has disappeared utterly. I work with absences, with silences, with curious gaps between things. I am really more of a magician than anything else.’ Laurence Arne-Sayles, interview in The Secret Garden, May 1976.”

— Susanna Clarke

44. “Thaumatomane: a person possessed of a passion for magic and wonders, Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson.”

— Susanna Clarke

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

— Susanna Clarke

46. “The land is all too shallow It is painted on the sky And trembles like the wind-shook rain When the Raven King passed by.”

— Susanna Clarke

47. “Do you trust the House? I ask Myself. Yes, I answer Myself. And if the House has made you forget, then it has done so for good reason. But I do not understand the reason. It does not matter that you do not understand the reason. You are the Beloved Child of the House. Be comforted. And I am comforted.”

— Susanna Clarke

48. “May your Paths be safe, your Floors unbroken and may the House fill your eyes with Beauty.”

— Susanna Clarke

49. “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

50. “To a magician there is very little difference between a mirror and a door.”

— Susanna Clarke