Top 300 Susanna Clarke Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “A man as talented and handsome as yourself ought not be a servant!” he said in a shocked tone. “He ought to be the ruler of a vast estate! What is beauty for, I should like to know, if not to stand as a visible sign of one’s superiority to everyone else? But I see how it is! Your enemies have conspired together to deprive you of all your possessions and to cast you down among the ignorant and lowly!”

— Susanna Clarke

202. “The way the ancient perceived the world was the way the world truly was. This gave them extraordinary influence and power. Reality was not only capable of taking part in a dialogue – intellegible and articulate – it was also persuadable.”

— Susanna Clarke

203. “This experience led me to form a hypothesis: perhaps the wisdom of birds resides, not in the individual, but in the flock, the congregation. I have tried to think of an experiment that would test this theory. The problem, as I see it, is that it is impossible to know in advance when such events will occur; and so the only viable course of action is months – more likely years – of careful observation and meticulous record keeping.”

— Susanna Clarke

204. “And where were you?’ he asks. ‘While you were gone?’ ‘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

205. “Like Mrs Pleasance I always fancy that misers are old. I cannot tell why this should be since I am sure that there are as many young misers as old. As to whether or not Mr Norrell was in fact old, he was the sort of man who had been old at seventeen.”

— Susanna Clarke

206. “The brown fields were partly flooded; they were strung with chains of chill, grey pools. The pattern of the pools had meaning. The pools had been written on to 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

207. “So this, as far as I can tell, is what the birds told me. A message from afar. Obscure Writing. Innocence eroded.”

— Susanna Clarke

208. “I thought that I was going to die; or else that I would be swept away to Unknown Halls, far from the rush and thrum of Familiar Tides. I clung on.”

— Susanna Clarke

209. “And so I have to ask Myself: whose memory is at fault? Mine or his? Might he in fact be remembering conversations that never happened?”

— Susanna Clarke

210. “When night fell, I listened to the Songs that the Moon and Stars were singing and I sang with them.”

— Susanna Clarke

211. “Nan told me Clegg had been hanged for stealing a book, but the charge Robert Findhelm brought against him was not theft. The charge Findhelm brought against him was book-murder.”

— Susanna Clarke

212. “I must not become so absorbed in my scientific work that I forget to fish and end up with nothing to eat.”

— Susanna Clarke

213. “The rooks made a fuss at my approach. Yes, yes. I am glad to see you too, I told them. Only I have things to do today and cannot stop for a long conversation.”

— Susanna Clarke

214. “If ever I find your remains I will bring you offerings of food and drink. If it seems to me that no one living is caring for you then I will gather up your bones and bring them to my own Halls. I will put you in good order and lay you with my own Dead. Then you will not be alone.”

— Susanna Clarke

215. “But these people were judged very stupid by their friends. Was not Jonathan Strange known to be precisely the sort of whimsical, contradictory person who would publish against himself?”

— Susanna Clarke

216. “There are books about magic and there are books of magic, and the price of the latter is far above rubies.”

— Susanna Clarke

217. “Two memories. Two bright minds which remember past events differently. It is an awkward situation. There exists no third person to say which of us is correct.”

— Susanna Clarke

218. “I have to consider the needs of the Biscuit-Box Man – and the Folded-Up Child – and the People of the Alcove. They only have me to take care of them. They are in unfamiliar surroundings and may feel disconcerted. I have to return them to their appointed places.”

— Susanna Clarke

219. “They were all enamoured with the idea of progress and believed that whatever was new must be superior to what was old. As if merit was a function of chronology!”

— Susanna Clarke

220. “The Beams of the Declining Sun shone through the Windows of the Lower Halls, striking the Surface of the Waves and making ripples of golden Light flow across the Ceiling of the Staircase and over the Faces of the Statues.”

— Susanna Clarke

221. “The first ten books Mr. Segundus looked at were worthless – books of sermons and moralizing from the last century, or descriptions of persons whom no one living cared about. The next fifty were very much the same. He began to think his task would soon be done. But then he stumbled upon some very interesting and unusual works of geology, philosophy and medicine. He began to feel more sanguine.”

— Susanna Clarke

222. “They looked at each other for a long moment, and in that moment, all was as it used to be. It was as if they had never parted. She did not offer to go into the Darkness with him, and he did not ask her.”

— Susanna Clarke

223. “I do not intend to go, in the space of one hour, from the helplessness of enchantment to another sort of helplessness!”

— Susanna Clarke

224. “I remember how the smell of the rain that pervaded the streets did not die away as I entered, but somehow intensified; inside the house there was a smell of rain, clouds and air, a smell of limitless space. A smell of the sea.”

— Susanna Clarke

225. “Raphael nodded slowly. ‘That’s OK,’ she said. ‘There’s plenty of time.’ She put out her hand and rather awkwardly – but also gently – put her hand on my shoulder. Instantly, and to my huge embarrassment, I started crying. Great creaking sobs rose up in my chest and tears sprouted from my eyes. I did not think that it was me who was crying; it was Matthew Rose Sorensen crying through my eyes. It lasted for a long time until it tailed off into braying, hiccupping gulps for Air.”

— Susanna Clarke

226. “Chaston wrote that a great many fairies harboured a vague sense of having been treated badly by the English. Though it was a mystery to Chaston – as it is to me – why they should have thought so. In the houses of the great English magicians fairies were the first among the servants and sat in the best places after the magician and his lady.”

— Susanna Clarke

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

— Susanna Clarke

228. “There are some things which have no business being put into books for all the world to read.”

— Susanna Clarke

229. “I no longer feel quite so alarmed when a nonsensical word in my Journal gives rise to a mental image that I cannot account for. Do not be anxious, I tell Myself. It is the House. It is the House enlarging your understanding.”

— Susanna Clarke

230. “Strange finished: “People have such odd notions about magicians. They wanted me to tell them about vampyres.”

— Susanna Clarke

231. “Perhaps the wisdom of birds resides, not in the individual, but in the flock, the congregation.”

— Susanna Clarke

232. “His mouth was long and mobile, red and oddly wet.”

— Susanna Clarke

233. “In May 1976 Arne-Sayles wrote a letter to the director of the museum, asking to borrow the head so that he could perform a magical rite of his own invention, transfer the seer’s knowledge to himself and so usher in a New Age for Mankind. To Arne-Sayles’s astonishment, the director refused.”

— Susanna Clarke

234. “Raphael left, disappearing into the Shadowy Space between the two Minotaurs in the South-Eastern Corner of the Vestibule.”

— Susanna Clarke

235. “It contained a spell for turning Members of Parliament into useful members of society and now, just when Uncle Auberon thought he had a use for it, he could not find it.”

— Susanna Clarke

236. “This is what I call a Distributary World – it was created by ideas flowing out of another world. This world could not have existed unless that other world had existed first. Whether this world is still dependent on.”

— Susanna Clarke

237. “A well-informed mind, nice manners and a gentle nature – all of these are much more likely to contribute to a husband’s happiness than mere transient beauty.”

— Susanna Clarke

238. “I left the Embrace of the Faun and wandered miserably through the House. I believed that I was mad – or that I had been mad – or else that I was becoming mad now. Whichever way it was, it was a terrifying prospect. After a while I decided that this way of going on did no good at all.”

— Susanna Clarke

239. “At that moment their conversation was interrupted by a most barbaric sound – a great horn was being blown. A number of men rushed forward and heaved the great town gates shut. Thinking that perhaps some danger threatened the town, Stephen looked round in alarm. “Sir, what is happening?” “Oh, it is these people’s custom to shut the gate every night against the wicked heathen,” said the gentleman, languidly, “by which they mean everyone except themselves. But.”

— Susanna Clarke

240. “The idea of forty precious volumes being taken into a country in a state of war where they might get burnt, blown up, drowned or dusty was almost too horrible to contemplate. 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! Could soldiers read? Mr Norrell did not know.”

— Susanna Clarke

241. “The Tides themselves are full of movement and power so that, while they may not exactly be alive, neither are they not-alive.”

— Susanna Clarke

242. “He was one of those people whose ideas are too lively to be confined in their brains and spill out into the world to the consternation of passers-by.”

— Susanna Clarke

243. “I will concentrate on lending you the strength of my Spirit,’ I said. ‘Fine. Good. You do that.”

— Susanna Clarke

244. “I am not home. I am here.”

— Susanna Clarke

245. “It was a dark day. A chill wind blew snowflakes against the window of Mr Norrell’s library where Childermass sat writing business letters. Though it was only ten o’clock in the morning the candles were already lit. The only sounds were the coals being consumed in the grate and the scratch of Childermass’s pen against the paper.”

— Susanna Clarke

246. “A blush rose to my face. I fixed my eyes on the Pavement. The Other was so neat, so elegant in his suit and his shining shoes. I, on the other hand, was not neat. My clothes were ragged and faded, rotten with the Sea Water I fished in. I hated drawing his attention to this contrast between us, but nevertheless he had asked me and so I must answer. I said, ‘What changed was that I used to have shoes. Now I have none.”

— Susanna Clarke

247. “Even then I knew that the Tides were not random. I saw that if I could record and document them, I might be able to predict their appearance. That was the beginning of my Table.”

— Susanna Clarke

248. “Where in the world have you been?” demanded Strange. “Walking,” she said. Her voice was just as it had always been. “Walking! Arabella, are you quite mad? In three feet of snow? Where?” “In the dark woods,” she said, “among my soft-sleeping brothers and sisters. Across the high moors among the sweet-scented ghosts of my brothers and sisters long dead. Under the grey sky through the dreams and murmurs of my brothers and sisters yet to come.” Strange stared at her. “What?”

— Susanna Clarke

249. “Batter-Sea is not a word,’ I said at last. ‘It has no referent. There is nothing in the World corresponding to that combination of sounds.”

— Susanna Clarke

250. “The intention of the French was to cruise about the Bay of Biscay looking for British ships to capture or, if they were unable to do that, to prevent the British from doing any thing which they appeared to want to do.”

— Susanna Clarke