Top 300 Susanna Clarke Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “The World feels Complete and Whole, and I, its Child, fit into it seamlessly. Nowhere is there any disjuncture where I ought to remember something but do not, where I ought to understand something but do not.”

— Susanna Clarke

102. “To Strange’s unnautical eye, it looked very much as if the ship had simply lain down and gone to sleep. He felt that if he had been the Captain he would have spoken to her sternly and made her get up again.”

— Susanna Clarke

103. “Houses, like people, are apt to become rather eccentric if left too much on their own;.”

— Susanna Clarke

104. “The gentlemen among my readers will smile to themselves and say that women never did understand business, but the ladies may agree with me that Mrs Brandy understood her business very well, for the chief business of Mrs Brandy’s life was to make Stephen Black as much in love with her as she was with him.”

— Susanna Clarke

105. “I was always amazed at Cambridge how quickly people appeared to take offence at everything I said, but now I see plainly that it was not my words they hated – it was this fairy face. The dark alchemy of this face turns all my gentle human emotions into fierce fairy vices. Inside I am all despair, but this face shows only fairy scorn. My remorse becomes fairy fury and my pensiveness is turned to fairy cunning.”

— Susanna Clarke

106. “It was an old fashioned house – the sort of house in fact, as Strange expressed it, which a lady in a novel might like to be persecuted in.”

— Susanna Clarke

107. “Bonifazia murmured appeals to the Virgin and several saints. Aunt Greysteel, who was equally alarmed, might well have been glad of the same refuge, but as a member of the communion of the Church of England, she could only exclaim, “Dear me!” and, “Upon my word!” and “Lord bless me!” – none of which gave her much comfort.”

— Susanna Clarke

108. “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.”

— Susanna Clarke

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

— Susanna Clarke

110. “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

111. “Like many spells with unusual names, the Unrobed Ladies was a great deal less exciting than it sounded.”

— Susanna Clarke

112. “This experience led me to form a hypothesis: perhaps the wisdom of birds resides, not in the individual, but in the flock, the congregation.”

— Susanna Clarke

113. “Strange,” said Henry Woodhope, “where did you get this nonsense?” “From the man under the hedge. Henry, you do not listen.” “And he seemed honest, did he?” “Honest? No, not particularly. He seemed, I would say, cold. Yes, ‘cold’ is a good word to describe him and ‘hungry’ another.”

— Susanna Clarke

114. “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

115. “In the fish-market by the Grand Canal a fisherman sold Frank three mullet, but then almost neglected to take the money because his attention was given to the argument he was conducting with his neighbour as to whether the English magician had gone mad because he was a magician, or because he was English.”

— Susanna Clarke

116. “She spoke Basque, which is a language which rarely makes any impression upon the brains of any other race, so that a man may hear it as often and as long as he likes, but never afterwards be able to recall a single syllable of it.”

— Susanna Clarke

117. “Bryon 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.”

— Susanna Clarke

118. “I can see it is in the nature of men to prefer one thing to another, to find one thing more meaningful than another.”

— Susanna Clarke

119. “Country gentlemen who read in their newspapers the speeches of this or that Minister would mutter to themselves that he was certainly a clever fellow. But the country gentlemen were not made comfortable by this thought. The country gentlemen had a strong suspicion that cleverness was somehow unBritish. That sort of restless, unpredictable brilliance belonged most of all to Britain’s arch-enemy, the Emperor Napoleon Buonaparte; the country gentlemen could not approve it.”

— Susanna Clarke

120. “For the rest of the night he sat by himself under the elm-tree. Until this moment it had never seemed to him that his magicianship set him apart from other men. But now he had glimpsed the wrong side of something. He had the eeriest feeling – as if the world were growing older around him, and the best part of existence – laughter, love and innocence – were slipping irrevocably into the past.”

— Susanna Clarke

121. “Soldiers, I am sorry to say, steal everything.” He thought for a moment and then added, “Or at least ours do.” How.”

— Susanna Clarke

122. “Several times Waves passed over our heads, but they fell back the next instant. We were drenched, we were numbed, we were blinded, we were deafened; but always we were saved.”

— Susanna Clarke

123. “Yet we ought to kill someone!′ said the gentleman, immediately reverting to his former subject. ‘I have been quite out of temper this morning and someone ought to die for it.”

— Susanna Clarke

124. “Whenever I wish to do something, I simply speak to the air – or to the stones – or to the sunlight – or the sea – or to whatever it is and politely request them to help me. And then, since my alliances with these powerful spirits were set in place thousands of years ago, they are only too glad to do whatever I ask.”

— Susanna Clarke

125. “Yet within Mr Norrell’s dry little heart there was as lively an ambition to bring back magic to England as would satisfied even Mr Honeyfoot, and it was with the intention of bring that ambition to a long-postponed fulfilment that Mr Norrell now proposed to go to London.”

— Susanna Clarke

126. “Being a politician, he was never dissuaded from giving any body his opinion by the mere fact that they were not inclined to hear it.”

— Susanna Clarke

127. “I believe I have made my opinion of him pretty widely known, and though I have done myself no good by my honesty, I am pleased to say that I have done him some harm.”

— Susanna Clarke

128. “Perhaps even people you like and admire immensely can make you see the World in ways you would rather not.”

— Susanna Clarke

129. “No, indeed!” she cried, all indignation. “I have no notion of asking people to perform services for me which I can do perfectly well for myself. I do not intend to go, in the space of one hour, from the helplessness of enchantment to another sort of helplessness!” pg. 761.”

— Susanna Clarke

130. “But a soldier ought not to dwell too long on such matters. His life is full of hardship and he must take his pleasure where he can. Though he may take time to reflect upon the cruelties that he sees, place him among his comrades and it is almost impossible for his spirits not to rise. Strange.”

— Susanna Clarke

131. “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

132. “Every man and woman present thought how the neatly drawn lines and words upon the maps were in truth ice-covered pools and rivers, silent woods, frozen ditches and high, bare hills and every one of them thought how many sheep and cattle and wild creatures died in this season.”

— Susanna Clarke

133. “The war went from bad to worse and the Government was universally detested. As each fresh catastrophe came to the public’s notice some small share of blame might attach itself to this or that person, but in general everyone united in blaming the Ministers, and they, poor things, had no one to blame but each other – which they did more and more frequently.”

— Susanna Clarke

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

— Susanna Clarke

135. “And You. Who are You? Who is it that I am writing for? Are You a traveller who has cheated Tides and crossed Broken Floors and Derelict Stairs to reach these Halls? Or are You perhaps someone who inhabits my own Halls long after I am dead?”

— Susanna Clarke

136. “This realisation – the realisation of the Insignificance of the Knowledge – came to me in the form of a Revelation. What I mean by this is that I knew it to be true before I understood why or what steps had led me there.”

— Susanna Clarke

137. “This is the genius of my enemy! Lock a door against him and all that happens is that he learns first how to pick a lock and second how to build a better one against you!”

— Susanna Clarke

138. “With his long hair as ragged as rain and as black as thunder, he would have looked quite at home upon a windswept moor, or lurking in some pitch-black alleyway, or perhaps in a novel by Mrs. Radcliffe.”

— Susanna Clarke

139. “More than one soldier wondered if, at last, the French had found a magician of their own; the French infantrymen appeared much taller than ordinary men and the light in their eyes as they drew closer burnt with an almost supernatural fury. But this was only the magic of Napoleon Buonaparte, who knew better than any one how to dress his soldiers so they would terrify the enemy, and how to deploy them so that any onlooker would think them indestructible.”

— Susanna Clarke

140. “I was in a house with many rooms. The sea sweeps through the house. Sometimes it swept over me, but always I was saved.”

— Susanna Clarke

141. “Mr. Norrell did not know a great deal about war, but he suspected that soldiers are not generally your great respecters of books. They might put their dirty fingers on them. They might tear them! They might- horror of horrors!- read them and try the spells!”

— Susanna Clarke

142. “The man under the hedge, sir. He is a magician. Did you never hear that if you wake a magician before his time, you risk bringing his dreams out of his head into the world?”

— Susanna Clarke

143. “Once, men and women were able to turn themselves into eagles and fly immense distances. They communed with rivers and mountains and received wisdom from them. They felt the turning of the stars inside their own minds.”

— Susanna Clarke

144. “The pools had been written onto the fields by the rain. The pools were a magic worked by the rain, just as the tumbling of the black birds against the grey was a spell that the sky was working and the motion of grey-brown grasses was a spell that the wind made. Everything had meaning.”

— Susanna Clarke

145. “David often lectured Tom upon the responsibilities of parenthood which annoyed Tom who considered himself to be a quite exemplary fairy parent. He provided generously for his children and grandchildren and only in exceptional circumstances had any of them put to death.”

— Susanna Clarke

146. “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.”

— Susanna Clarke

147. “Night fishing is best, when the fish are drawn to play in spots of bright Moonlight and are easy to see.”

— Susanna Clarke

148. “Abandoning the search for the Knowledge would free us to pursue a new sort of science. We could follow any path that the data suggested to us.”

— Susanna Clarke

149. “I am an anamnesiologist. I study what has been forgotten.”

— Susanna Clarke

150. “The knowledge we seek isn’t something new. It’s old. Really old. Once upon a time people possessed it and they used it to do great things, miraculous things. They should have held on to it. They should have respected it. But they didn’t. They abandoned it for the sake of something they called progress. And it’s up to us to get it back. We’re not doing this for ourselves; we’re doing it for humanity.”

— Susanna Clarke